THE  BRIDE  OF  THE  MISTLETOE 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

NEW  YORK  •    BOSTON  •    CHICAGO 
ATLANTA  •   SAN   FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  LIMITED 

LONDON  •   BOMBAY  •    CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  LTD. 

TORONTO 


THE   BRIDE  OF  THE 
MISTLETOE 


BY 


JAMES    LANE   ALLEN 

AUTHOR   OF   "FLUTE  AND   VIOLIN,"    "A   KENTUCKY 
CARDINAL,"    "AFTERMATH,"    ETC. 


Nefo  gorfe 

THE   MACMILLAN   COMPANY 
1909 

All  rights  reserved 


COPYRIGHT,  1909, 
BY  THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY. 


Set  up  and  electrotyped.    Published  June,  1909. 


XortocoU 

J.  S.  Gushing  Co.  —  Berwick  &  Smith  Co. 
Norwood,  Mass.,  U.S.A. 


TO  ONE  WHO   KNOWS 


267702 


Je  crois  que  pour  produire  il  ne  faut  pas  trop  raissoner. 
Mais  il  faut  regarder  beaucoup  et  songer  a  ce  qu'on  a  vu. 
Voir :  tout  est  la,  et  voir  juste.  J'entends,  par  voir  juste, 
voir  avec  ses  propres  yeux  et  non  avec  ceux  des  maltres. 
L'originalite'  d'un  artiste  s'indique  d'abord  dans  les  petites 
choses  et  non  dans  les  grandes. 

II  faut  trouver  aux  choses  une  signification  qui  n'a  pas 
encore  decouverte  et  tacher  de  rexprimer  d'une  fa9on 

personelle. 

—  GUY  DE  MAUPASSANT. 


PREFACE 

ANY  one  about  to  read  this  work  of  fiction 
might  properly  be  apprised  beforehand  that  it 
is  not  a  novel:  it  has  neither  the  structure  nor 
the  purpose  of  The  Novel. 

It  is  a  story.  There  are  two  characters  — 
a  middle-aged  married  couple  living  in  a  plain 
farmhouse;  one  point  on  the  field  of  human 
nature  is  located ;  at  that  point  one  subject  is 
treated;  in  the  treatment  one  movement  is 
directed  toward  one  climax;  no  external  event 
whatsoever  is  introduced ;  and  the  time  is  about 
forty  hours. 

A  second  story  of  equal  length,  laid  in  the 
same  house,  is  expected  to  appear  within  a 
twelvemonth.  The  same  father  and  mother 
are  characters,  and  the  family  friend  the  country 
doctor ;  but  subordinately  all.  The  main  story 
concerns  itself  with  the  four  children  of  the  two 
households. 

It  is  an  American  children's  story : 

"A  Brood  of  The  Eagle." 


viii  Preface 

During  the  year  a  third  work,  not  fiction,  will 

be  published,  entitled  : 

"  The  Christmas  Tree  :  An  Interpretation." 
The  three  works  will  serve  to  complete  each 

other,  and  they  complete  a  cycle  of  the  theme. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

EARTH  SHIELD  AND  EARTH  FESTIVAL  i 

I 
THE  MAN  AND  THE  SECRET 11 

II 
THE  TREE  AND  THE  SUNSET          .        .  -39 

III 
THE  LIGHTING  OF  THE  CANDLES   .        .        .        .67 

IV 
THE  WANDERING  TALE         .....      93 

V 

THE  ROOM  OF  THE  SILENCES         .        .        .        .     133 

VI 
THE  WHITE  DAWN IS1 


EARTH   SHIELD   AND 
EARTH    FESTIVAL 


THE 
BRIDE  OF  THE   MISTLETOE 

EARTH  SHIELD  AND  EARTH  FESTIVAL 

MIGHTY  table-land  lies  southward 
in  a  hardy  region  of  our  country. 
It  has  the  form  of  a  colossal 
Shield,  lacking  and  broken  in  some 
of  its  outlines  and  rough  and  rude 
of  make.  Nature  forged  it  for  some  crisis  in 
her  long  warfare  of  time  and  change,  made  use 
of  it,  and  so  left  it  lying  as  one  of  her  ancient 
battle-pieces  —  Kentucky. 

The  great  Shield  is  raised  high  out  of  the  earth 
at  one  end  and  sunk  deep  into  it  at  the  other.  It 
is  tilted  away  from  the  dawn  toward  the  sunset. 
Where  the  western  dip  of  it  reposes  on  the  planet, 
Nature,  cunning  artificer,  set  the  stream  of  ocean 
flowing  past  with  restless  foam  —  the  Father  of 
Waters.  Along  the  edge  for  a  space  she  bound 
a  bright  river  to  the  rim  of  silver.  And  where 
the  eastern  part  rises  loftiest  on  the  horizon, 


4  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

turned  away  from  the  reddening  daybreak,  she 
piled  shaggy  mountains  wooded  with  trees  that 
loose  their  leaves  ere  snowflakes  fly  and  with 
steadfast  evergreens  which  hold  to  theirs  through 
the  gladdening  and  the  saddening  year.  Then 
crosswise  over  the  middle  of  the  Shield,  north 
ward  and  southward  upon  the  breadth  of  it, 
covering  the  life-born  rock  of  many  thicknesses, 
she  drew  a  tough  skin  of  verdure  —  a  broad  strip 
of  hide  of  the  ever  growing  grass.  She  embossed 
noble  forests  on  this  greensward  and  under  the 
forests  drew  clear  waters. 

This  she  did  in  a  time  of  which  we  know  noth 
ing  —  uncharted  ages  before  man  had  emerged 
from  the  deeps  of  ocean  with  eyes  to  wonder, 
thoughts  to  wander,  heart  to  love,  and  spirit  to 
pray.  Many  a  scene  the  same  power  has  wrought 
out  upon  the  surface  of  the  Shield  since  she  brought 
him  forth  and  set  him  there:  many  an  old  one, 
many  a  new.  She  has  made  it  sometimes  a 
Shield  of  war,  sometimes  a  Shield  of  peace. 
Nor  has  she  yet  finished  with  its  destinies  as  she 
has  not  yet  finished  with  anything  in  the  universe. 
While  therefore  she  continues  her  will  and  pleas- 


Earth  Shield  and  Earth  Festival  5 

ure  elsewhere  throughout  creation,  she  does  not 
forget  the  Shield. 

She  likes  sometimes  to  set  upon  it  scenes  which 
admonish  man  how  little  his  lot  has  changed  since 
Hephaistos  wrought  like  scenes  upon  the  shield  of 
Achilles,  and  Thetis  of  the  silver  feet  sprang  like 
a  falcon  from  snowy  Olympus  bearing  the  glitter 
ing  piece  of  armor  to  her  angered  son. 

These  are  some  of  the  scenes  that  were  wrought 
on  the  shield  of  Achilles  and  that  to-day  are 
spread  over  the  Earth  Shield  Kentucky: 

Espousals  and  marriage  feasts  and  the  blaze 
of  lights  as  they  lead  the  bride  from  her  chamber, 
flutes  and  violins  sounding  merrily.  An  assembly- 
place  where  the  people  are  gathered,  a  strife 
having  arisen  about  the  blood-price  of  a  man 
slain ;  the  old  lawyers  stand  up  one  after  another 
and  make  their  tangled  arguments  in  turn.  Soft, 
freshly  ploughed  fields  where  ploughmen  drive 
their  teams  to  and  fro,  the  earth  growing  dark 
behind  the  share.  The  estate  of  a  landowner 
where  laborers  are  reaping;  some  armfuls  the 
binders  are  binding  with  twisted  bands  of  straw : 
among  them  the  farmer  is  standing  in  silence, 


6  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

leaning  on  his  staff,  rejoicing  in  his  heart.  Vine 
yards  with  purpling  clusters  and  happy  folk 
gathering  these  in  plaited  baskets  on  sunny  after 
noons.  A  herd  of  cattle  with  incurved  horns 
hurrying  from  the  stable  to  the  woods  where 
there  is  running  water  and  where  purple- topped 
weeds  bend  above  the  sleek  grass.  A  fair  glen 
with  white  sheep.  A  dancing-place  under  the 
trees;  girls  and  young  men  dancing,  their  fingers 
on  one  another's  wrists:  a  great  company  stands 
watching  the  lovely  dance  of  joy. 

Such  pageants  appeared  on  the  shield  of  Achilles 
as  art;  as  pageants  of  life  they  appear  on  the 
Earth  Shield  Kentucky.  The  metal-worker  of 
old  wrought  them  upon  the  armor  of  the  Greek 
warrior  in  tin  and  silver,  bronze  and  gold.  The 
world-designer  sets  them  to-day  on  the  throbbing 
land  in  nerve  and  blood,  toil  and  delight  and 
passion.  But  there  with  the  old  things  she 
mingles  new  things,  with  the  never  changing  the 
ever  changing;  for  the  old  that  remains  always 
the  new  and  the  new  that  perpetually  becomes 
old  —  these  Nature  allots  to  man  as  his  two 
portions  wherewith  he  must  abide  steadfast  in 


Earth  Shield  and  Earth  Festival          7 

what  he  is  and  go  upward  or  go  downward 
through  all  that  he  is  to  become. 

But  of  the  many  scenes  which  she  in  our  time 
sets  forth  upon  the  stately  grassy  Shield  there 
is  a  single  spectacle  that  she  spreads  over  the 
length  and  breadth  of  it  once  every  year  now  as 
best  liked  by  the  entire  people;  and  this  is  both 
old  and  new. 

It  is  old  because  it  contains  man's  faith  in  his 
immortality,  which  was  venerable  with  age  be 
fore  the  shield  of  Achilles  ever  grew  effulgent 
before  the  sightless  orbs  of  Homer.  It  is  new 
because  it  contains  those  latest  hopes  and  reasons 
for  this  faith,  which  briefly  blossom  out  upon  the 
primitive  stock  with  the  altering  years  and  soon 
are  blown  away  upon  the  winds  of  change.  Since 
this  spectacle,  this  festival,  is  thus  old  and  is  thus 
new  and  thus  enwraps  the  deepest  thing  in  the 
human  spirit,  it  is  never  forgotten. 

When  in  vernal  days  any  one  turns  a  furrow  or 
sows  in  the  teeth  of  the  wind  and  glances  at  the 
fickle  sky;  when  under  the  summer  shade  of  a 
flowering  tree  any  one  looks  out  upon  his  fatted 
herds  and  fattening  grain;  whether  there  is 


8  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

autumnal  plenty  in  his  barn  or  autumnal  empti 
ness,  autumnal  peace  in  his  breast  or  autumnal 
strife,  —  all  days  of  the  year,  in  the  assembly- 
place,  in  the  dancing-place,  whatsoever  of  good 
or  ill  befall  in  mind  or  hand,  never  does  one 
forget. 

When  nights  are  darkest  and  days  most  dark; 
when  the  sun  seems  farthest  from  the  planet  and 
cheers  it  with  lowest  heat;  when  the  fields  lie 
shorn  between  harvest-time  and  seed-time  and 
man  turns  wistful  eyes  back  and  forth  between 
the  mystery  of  his  origin  and  the  mystery  of  his 
end,  —  then  comes  the  great  pageant  of  the  winter 
solstice,  then  comes  Christmas. 

So  what  is  Christmas  ?  And  what  for  centuries 
has  it  been  to  differing  but  always  identical 
mortals  ? 

It  was  once  the  old  pagan  festival  of  dead 
Nature.  It  was  once  the  old  pagan  festival  of 
the  reappearing  sun.  It  was  the  pagan  festival 
when  the  hands  of  labor  took  their  rest  and  hunger 
took  its  fill.  It  was  the  pagan  festival  to  honor 
the  descent  of  the  fabled  inhabitants  of  an  upper 
world  upon  the  earth,  their  commerce  with  com- 


Earth  Shield  and  Earth  Festival          9 

mon  flesh,  and  the  production  of  a  race  of  divine- 
and-human  half-breeds.  It  is  now  the  festival 
of  the  Immortal  Child  appearing  in  the  midst 
of  mortal  children.  It  is  now  the  new  festival 
of  man's  remembrance  of  his  errors  and  his 
charity  toward  erring  neighbors.  It  has  latterly 
become  the  widening  festival  of  universal  brother 
hood  with  succor  for  all  need  and  nighness  to  all 
suffering;  of  good  will  warring  against  ill  will 
and  of  peace  warring  upon  war. 

And  thus  for  all  who  have  anywhere  come  to 
know  it,  Christmas  is  the  festival  of  the  better 
worldly  self.  But  better  than  worldliness,  it  is 
on  the  Shield  to-day  what  it  essentially  has  been 
through  many  an  age  to  many  people  —  the 
symbolic  Earth  Festival  of  the  Evergreen ;  setting 
forth  man's  pathetic  love  of  youth  —  of  his  own 
youth  that  will  not  stay  with  him;  and  renewing 
his  faith  in  a  destiny  that  winds  its  ancient  way 
upward  out  of  dark  and  damp  toward  Eternal 
Light. 

This  is  a  story  of  the  Earth  Festival  on  the 
Earth  Shield. 


THE    MAN   AND   THE   SECRET 


THE   MAN   AND   THE    SECRET 

MAN  sat  writing  near  a  window  of 
an  old  house  out  in  the  country  a 
few  years  ago ;  it  was  afternoon  of 
the  twenty-third  of  December. 

One  of  the  volumes  of  a  work 
on  American  Forestry  lay  open  on  the  desk  near 
his  right  hand ;  and  as  he  sometimes  stopped  in 
his  writing  and  turned  the  leaves,  the  illustra 
tions  showed  that  the  long  road  of  his  mental 
travels  —  for  such  he  followed  —  was  now  pass 
ing  through  the  evergreens. 

Many  notes  were  printed  at  the  bottoms  of  the 
pages.  They  burned  there  like  short  tapers  in  dim 
places,  often  lighting  up  obscure  faiths  and  cus 
toms  of  our  puzzled  human  race.  His  eyes  roved 
from  taper  to  taper,  as  gathering  knowledge  ray 
by  ray.  A  small  book  lay  near  the  large  one. 
It  dealt  with  primitive  nature-worship;  and  it 
belonged  in  the  class  of  those  that  are  kept  under 
13 


14  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

lock  and  key  by  the  libraries  which  possess  them 
as  unsafe  reading  for  unsafe  minds. 

Sheets  of  paper  covered  with  the  man's  clear, 
deliberate  handwriting  lay  thickly  on  the  desk. 
A  table  in  the  centre  of  the  room  was  strewn 
with  volumes,  some  of  a  secret  character,  opened 
for  reference.  On  the  tops  of  two  bookcases  and 
on  the  mantelpiece  were  prints  representing  scenes 
from  the  oldest  known  art  of  the  East.  These 
and  other  prints  hanging  about  the  walls,  however 
remote  from  each  other  in  the  times  and  places 
where  they  had  been  gathered,  brought  together 
in  this  room  of  a  quiet  Kentucky  farmhouse 
evidence  bearing  upon  the  same  object :  the  sub 
ject  related  in  general  to  trees  and  in  especial 
evergreens. 

While  the  man  was  immersed  in  his  work,  he 
appeared  not  to  be  submerged.  His  left  hand 
was  always  going  out  to  one  or  the  other  of  three 
picture-frames  on  the  desk  and  his  fingers  bent 
caressingly. 

Two  of  these  frames  held  photographs  of  four 
young  children  —  a  boy  and  a  girl  comprising 
each  group.  The  children  had  the  air  of  being 


The  Man  and  the  Secret  15 

well  enough  bred  to  be  well  behaved  before  the 
camera,  but  of  being  unruly  and  disorderly  out 
of  sheer  health  and  a  wild  naturalness.  All  of 
them  looked  straight  at  you;  all  had  eyes  wide 
open  with  American  frankness  and  good  humor; 
all  had  mouths  shut  tight  with  American  en 
ergy  and  determination.  Apparently  they  already 
believed  that  the  New  World  was  behind  them, 
that  the  nation  backed  them  up.  In  a  way  you 
believed  it.  You  accepted  them  on  the  spot  as 
embodying  that  marvellous  precocity  in  American 
children,  through  which  they  early  in  life  be 
come  conscious  of  the  country  and  claim  it  their 
country  and  believe  that  it  claims  them.  Thus 
they  took  on  the  distinction  of  being  a  squad  de 
tached  only  photographically  from  the  rank  and 
file  of  the  white  armies  of  the  young  in  the  New 
World,  millions  and  millions  strong,  as  they 
march,  clear-eyed,  clear-headed,  joyous,  magnifi 
cent,  toward  new  times  and  new  destinies  for 
the  nation  and  for  humanity  —  a  kinder  knowl 
edge  of  man  and  a  kinder  ignorance  of  God. 

The  third  frame  held  the  picture  of  a  woman 
probably  thirty  years  of  age.     Her  features  were 


1 6  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

without  noticeable  American  characteristics. 
What  human  traits  you  saw  depended  upon  what 
human  traits  you  saw  with. 

The  hair  was  dark  and  abundant,  the  brows 
dark  and  strong.  And  the  lashes  were  dark  and 
strong;  and  the  eyes  themselves,  so  thornily 
hedged  about,  somehow  brought  up  before  you 
a  picture  of  autumn  thistles  —  thistles  that  look 
out  from  the  shadow  of  a  rock.  They  had  a 
veritable  thistle  quality  and  suggestiveness :  gray 
and  of  the  fields,  sure  of  their  experience  in  nature, 
freighted  with  silence. 

Despite  grayness  and  thorniness,  however, 
you  saw  that  they  were  in  the  summer  of  their 
life-bloom;  and  singularly  above  even  their 
beauty  of  blooming  they  held  what  is  rare  in 
the  eyes  of  either  men  or  women  —  they  held  a 
look  of  being  just. 

The  whole  face  was  an  oval,  long,  regular, 
high-bred.  If  the  lower  part  had  been  hidden 
behind  a  white  veil  of  the  Orient  (by  that  little 
bank  of  snow  which  is  guardedly  built  in  front 
of  the  overflowing  desires  of  the  mouth) ,  the  upper 
part  would  have  given  the  impression  of  reserve, 


The  Man  and  the  Secret  17 

coldness,  possibly  of  severity;  yet  ruled  by  that 
one  look  —  the  garnered  wisdom,  the  tempering 
justice,  of  the  eyes.  The  whole  face  being  seen, 
the  lower  features  altered  the  impression  made 
by  the  upper  ones ;  reserve  became  bettered  into 
strength,  coldness  bettered  into  dignity,  severity 
of  intellect  transfused  into  glowing  nobleness  of 
character.  The  look  of  virgin  justice  in  her  was 
perhaps  what  had  survived  from  that  white  light 
of  life  which  falls  upon  young  children  as  from 
a  receding  sun  and  touches  lingeringly  their 
smiles  and  glances;  but  her  mouth  had  gathered 
its  shadowy  tenderness  as  she  walked  the  furrows 
of  the  years,  watching  their  changeful  harvests, 
eating  their  passing  bread. 

A  handful  of  some  of  the  green  things  of  winter 
lay  before  her  picture:  holly  boughs  with  their 
bold,  upright  red  berries ;  a  spray  of  the  cedar  of 
the  Kentucky  yards  with  its  rosary  of  piteous 
blue.  When  he  had  come  in  from  out  of  doors 
to  go  on  with  his  work,  he  had  put  them  there  — 
perhaps  as  some  tribute.  After  all  his  years 
with  her,  many  and  strong,  he  must  have  acquired 
various  tributes  and  interpretations;  but  to-day, 
c 


1 8  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

during  his  walk  in  the  woods,  it  had  befallen  him 
to  think  of  her  as  holly  which  ripens  amid  snows 
and  retains  its  brave  freshness  on  a  landscape 
of  departed  things.  As  cedar  also  which  every 
where  on  the  Shield  is  the  best  loved  of  forest- 
growths  to  be  the  companion  of  household  walls; 
so  that  even  the  poorest  of  the  people,  if  it  does  not 
grow  near  the  spot  they  build  in,  hunt  for  it  and 
bring  it  home :  everywhere  wife  and  cedar,  wife 
and  cedar,  wife  and  cedar. 

The  photographs  of  the  children  grouped  on 
each  side  of  hers  with  heads  a  little  lower  down 
called  up  memories  of  Old  World  pictures  in 
which  cherubs  smile  about  the  cloud-borne  feet 
of  the  heavenly  Hebrew  maid.  Glowing  young 
American  mother  with  four  healthy  children  as 
her  gifts  to  the  nation  —  this  was  the  practical 
thought  of  her  that  riveted  and  held. 

As  has  been  said,  they  were  in  two  groups,  the 
children ;  a  boy  and  girl  in  each.  The  four  were 
of  nearly  the  same  age ;  but  the  faces  of  two  were 
on  a  dimmer  card  in  an  older  frame.  You  glanced 
at  her  again  and  persuaded  yourself  that  the 
expression  of  motherhood  which  characterized 


The  Man  and  the  Secret  19 

her  separated  into  two  expressions  (as  behind 
a  thin  white  cloud  it  is  possible  to  watch  another 
cloud  of  darker  hue).  Nearer  in  time  was  the 
countenance  of  a  mother  happy  with  happy  off 
spring;  further  away  the  same  countenance  with 
drawn  a  little  into  shadow  —  the  face  of  the 
mother  bereaved  —  mute  and  changeless. 

The  man,  the  worker,  whom  this  little  flock  of 
wife  and  two  surviving  children  now  followed 
through  the  world  as  their  leader,  sat  with  his 
face  toward  his  desk  in  a  corner  of  the  room ;  sol 
idly  squared  before  his  undertaking,  liking  it, 
mastering  it ;  seldom  changing  his  position  as  the 
minutes  passed,  never  nervously ;  with  a  quietude 
in  him  that  was  oftener  in  Southern  gentlemen  in 
quieter,  more  gentlemanly  times.  A  low  powerful 
figure  with  a  pair  of  thick  shoulders  and  tre 
mendous  limbs;  filling  the  room  with  his  vitality 
as  a  heavy  passionate  animal  lying  in  a  corner  of 
a  cage  fills  the  space  of  the  cage,  so  that  you  wait 
for  it  to  roll  over  or  get  up  on  its  feet  and  walk 
about  that  you  may  study  its  markings  and  get 
an  inkling  of  its  conquering  nature. 

Meantime  there  were  hints  of  him.     When  he 


2O  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

had  come  in,  he  had  thrown  his  overcoat  on  a 
chair  that  stood  near  the  table  in  the  centre  of  the 
room  and  had  dropped  his  hat  upon  his  coat. 
It  had  slipped  to  the  floor  and  now  lay  there  —  a 
low,  soft  black  hat  of  a  kind  formerly  much  worn 
by  young  Southerners  of  the  countryside,  — 
especially  on  occasions  when  there  was  a  spur  of 
heat  in  their  mood  and  going,  —  much,  the  same 
kind  that  one  sees  on  the  heads  of  students  in 
Rome  in  whiter;  light,  warm,  shaping  itself 
readily  to  breezes  from  any  quarter,  to  be  doffed 
or  donned  as  comfortable  and  negligible.  It 
suggested  that  he  had  been  a  country  boy  in  the 
land,  still  belonged  to  the  land,  and  as  a  man 
kept  to  its  out-of-door  habits  and  fashions.  His 
shoes,  one  of  which  you  saw  at  each  side  of  his 
chair,  were  especially  well  made  for  rough-going 
feet  to  tramp  in  during  all  weathers. 

A  sack  suit  of  dark  blue  serge  somehow  helped 
to  withdraw  your  interpretation  of  him  from 
farm  life  to  the  arts  or  the  professions.  The 
scrupulous  air  of  his  shirt  collar,  showing  against 
the  clear-hued  flesh  at  the  back  of  his  neck,  and 
the  Van  Dyck-like  edge  of  the  shirt  cufft  defining 


The  Man  and  the  Secret  21 

his  powerful  wrist  and  hand,  strengthened  the 
notion  that  he  belonged  to  the  arts  or  to  the 
professions.  He  might  have  been  sitting  before 
a  canvas  instead  of  a  desk  and  holding  a  brush 
instead  of  a  pen:  the  picture  would  have  been 
true  to  life.  Or  truer  yet,  he  might  have  taken 
his  place  with  the  grave  group  of  students  in 
the  Lesson  in  Anatomy  left  by  Rembrandt. 

Once  he  put  down  his  pen,  wheeled  his  chair 
about,  and  began  to  read  the  page  he  had  just 
finished:  then  you  saw  him.  He  had  a  big, 
masculine,  solid-cut,  self-respecting,  normal- 
looking,  executive  head  —  covered  with  thick  yel 
lowish  hair  clipped  short;  so  that  while  every 
thing  else  in  his  appearance  indicated  that  he  was 
in  the  prime  of  manhood,  the  clipped  hair  caused 
him  to  appear  still  more  youthful;  and  it  invested 
him  with  a  rustic  atmosphere  which  went  along 
very  naturally  with  the  sentimental  country  hat 
and  the  all-weather  shoes.  He  seemed  at  first 
impression  a  magnificent  animal  frankly  loved  of 
the  sun  —  perhaps  too  warmly.  The  sun  itself 
seemed  to  have  colored  for  him  his  beard 
and  mustache  —  a  characteristic  hue  of  men's 


22  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

hair  and  beard  in  this  land  peopled  from  Old 
English  stock.  The  beard,  like  the  hair,  was  cut 
short,  as  though  his  idea  might  have  been  to  get 
both  hair  and  beard  out  of  life's  daily  way;  but 
his  mustache  curled  thickly  down  over  his 
mouth,  hiding  it.  In  the  whole  effect  there  was 
a  suggestion  of  the  Continent,  perhaps  of  a  former 
student  career  in  Germany,  memories  of  which 
may  still  have  lasted  with  him  and  the  marks  of 
which  may  have  purposely  been  kept  up  in  his 
appearance. 

But  such  a  fashion  of  beard,  while  covering  a 
man's  face,  does  much  to  uncover  the  man.  As 
he  sat  amid  his  papers  and  books,  your  thought 
surely  led  again  to  old  pictures  where  earnest 
heads  bend  together  over  some  point  on  the  human 
road,  at  which  knowledge  widens  and  suffering 
begins  to  be  made  more  bearable  and  death  more 
kind.  Perforce  now  you  interpreted  him  and 
fixed  his  general  working  category:  that  he  was 
absorbed  in  work  meant  to  be  serviceable  to 
humanity.  His  house,  the  members  of  his  family, 
the  people  of  his  neighborhood,  were  mean 
time  forgotten :  he  was  not  a  mere  dweller  on  his 


The  Man  and  the  Secret  23 

farm;  he  was  a  discoverer  on  the  wide  commons 
where  the  race  forever  camps  at  large  with  its 
problems,  joys,  and  sorrows. 

He  read  his  page,  his  hand  dropped  to  his 
knee,  his  mind  dropped  its  responsibility;  one 
of  those  intervals  followed  when  the  brain  rests. 
The  look  of  the  student  left  his  face;  over  it 
began  to  play  the  soft  lights  of  the  domestic 
affections.  He  had  forgotten  the  world  for  his 
own  place  in  the  world;  the  student  had  become 
the  husband  and  house-father.  A  few  moments 
only;  then  he  wheeled  gravely  to  his  work  again, 
his  right  hand  took  up  the  pen,  his  left  hand  went 
back  to  the  pictures. 

The  silence  of  the  room  seemed  a  guarded 
silence,  as  though  he  were  being  watched  over 
by  a  love  which  would  not  let  him  be  disturbed. 
(He  had  the  reposeful  self-assurance  of  a  man 
who  is  conscious  that  he  is  idolized.) 

Matching  the  silence  within  was  the  stillness 
out  of  doors.  An  immense  oak  tree  stood  just 
outside  the  windows.  It  was  a  perpetual  re 
minder  of  vanished  woods;  and  when  a  wind 
storm  tossed  and  twisted  it,  the  straining  and 


24  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

grinding  of  the  fibres  were  like  struggles  and  out 
cries  for  the  wild  life  of  old.  This  afternoon  it 
brooded  motionless,  an  image  of  forest  reflection. 
Once  a  small  black-and-white  sapsucker,  circling 
the  trunk  and  peering  into  the  crevices  of  the  bark 
on  a  level  with  the  windows,  uttered  minute  notes 
which  penetrated  into  the  room  like  steel  darts 
of  sound.  A  snowbird  alighted  on  the  window- 
sill,  glanced  familiarly  in  at  the  man,  and  shot  up 
its  crest;  but  disappointed  perhaps  that  it  was 
not  noticed,  quoted  its  resigned  gray  phrase  — 
a  phrase  it  had  made  for  itself  to  accompany  the 
score  of  gray  winter  —  and  flitted  on  billowy 
wings  to  a  juniper  at  the  corner  of  the  house, 
its  turret  against  the  long  javelins  of  the  North. 

Amid  the  stillness  of  Nature  outside  and  the 
house-silence  of  a  love  guarding  him  within,  the 
man  worked  on. 

A  little  clock  ticked  independently  on  the  old- 
fashioned  Parian  marble  mantelpiece.  Prints 
were  propped  against  its  sides  and  face,  illustrating 
the  use  of  trees  about  ancient  tombs  and  temples. 
Out  of  this  photographic  grove  of  dead  things  the 
uncaring  clock  threw  out  upon  the  air  a  living 


The  Man  and  the  Secret  25 

—  the  fateful  three  that  had  been  measured 
for  each  tomb  and  temple  in  its  own  land  and 
time. 

A  knock,  regretful  but  positive,  was  heard,  and 
the  door  opening  into  the  hall  was  quietly  pushed 
open.  A  glow  lit  up  the  student's  face  though 
he  did  not  stop  writing;  and  his  voice,  while  it 
gave  a  welcome,  unconsciously  expressed  regret 
at  being  disturbed : 

"  Come  in." 

"I  am  in!" 

He  lifted  his  heavy  figure  with  instant  courtesy 
—  rather  obsolete  now  —  and  bowing  to  one  side, 
sat  down  again. 

"So  I  see,"  he  said,  dipping  his  pen  into  his 
ink. 

"Since  you  did  not  turn  around,  you  would 
better  have  said  '  So  I  hear.'  It  is  three  o'clock." 

"So  I  hear." 

"You  said  you  would  be  ready." 

"I  am  ready." 

"You  said  you  would  be  done." 

"I  am  done  —  nearly  done." 

"How  nearly?" 


26  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

"  By  to-morrow  —  to-morrow  afternoon  before 
dark.  I  have  reached  the  end,  but  now  it  is  hard 
to  stop,  hard  to  let  go." 

His  tone  gave  first  place,  primary  consideration, 
to  his  work.  The  silence  in  the  room  suddenly 
became  charged.  When  the  voice  was  heard 
again,  there  was  constraint  in  it: 

"There  is  something  to  be  done  this  afternoon 
before  dark,  something  I  have  a  share  in.  Having 
a  share,  I  am  interested.  Being  interested,  I  am 
prompt.  Being  prompt,  I  am  here." 

He  waved  his  hand  over  the  written  sheets 
before  him  —  those  cold  Alps  of  learning ;  and 
asked  reproachfully: 

"Are  you  not  interested  in  all  this,  O  you  of 
little  faith?" 

"How  can  I  say,  O  me  of  little  knowledge !" 

As  the  words  impulsively  escaped,  he  heard  a 
quick  movement  behind  him.  He  widened  out 
his  heavy  arms  upon  his  manuscript  and  looked 
back  over  his  shoulder  at  her  and  laughed.  And 
still  smiling  and  holding  his  pen  between  his 
fingers,  he  turned  and  faced  her.  She  had  ad 
vanced  into  the  middle  of  the  room  and  had 


The  Man  and  the  Secret  2? 

stopped  at  the  chair  on  which  he  had  thrown  his 
overcoat  and  hat.  She  had  picked  up  the  hat  and 
stood  turning  it  and  pushing  its  soft  material  back 
into  shape  for  his  head  —  without  looking  at 
him. 

The  northern  light  of  the  winter  afternoon, 
entering  through  the  looped  crimson-damask 
curtains,  fell  sidewise  upon  the  woman  of  the 
picture. 

Years  had  passed  since  the  picture  had  been 
made.  There  were  changes  in  her;  she  looked 
younger.  She  had  effaced  the  ravages  of  a  sadder 
period  of  her  life  as  human  voyagers  upon  reaching 
quiet  port  repair  the  damages  of  wandering  and 
storm.  Even  the  look  of  motherhood,  of  the  two 
motherhoods,  which  so  characterized  her  in  the 
photograph,  had  disappeared  for  the  present. 
Seeing  her  now  for  the  first  time,  one  would  have 
said  that  her  whole  mood  and  bearing  made  a 
single  declaration:  she  was  neither  wife  nor 
mother;  she  was  a  woman  in  love  with  life's 
youth  —  with  youth  —  youth ;  in  love  with  the 
things  that  youth  alone  could  ever  secure  to 
her. 


28  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

The  carriage  of  her  beautiful  head,  brave  and 
buoyant,  brought  before  you  a  vision  of  growing 
things  in  nature  as  they  move  towards  their  summer 
yet  far  away.  There  still  was  youth  in  the  round 
white  throat  above  the  collar  of  green  velvet  — 
woodland  green  —  darker  than  the  green  of  the 
cloth  she  wore.  You  were  glad  she  had  chosen 
that  color  because  she  was  going  for  a  walk  with 
him;  and  green  would  enchain  the  eye  out  on 
the  sere  ground  and  under  the  stripped  trees.  The 
flecklessness  of  her  long  gloves  drew  your  thoughts 
to  winter  rather  —  to  its  one  beauteous  gift 
dropped  from  soiled  clouds.  A  slender  toque 
brought  out  the  keenness  in  the  oval  of  her  face. 
From  it  rose  one  backward-sweeping  feather  of 
green  shaded  to  coral  at  the  tip;  and  there  your 
fancy  may  have  cared  to  see  lingering  the  last 
radiance  of  winter-sunset  skies. 

He  kept  his  seat  with  his  back  to  the  manu 
script  from  which  he  had  repulsed  her;  and  his 
eyes  swept  loyally  over  her  as  she  waited.  Though 
she  could  scarcely  trust  herself  to  speak,  still 
less  could  she  endure  the  silence.  With  her 
face  turned  toward  the  windows  opening  on  the 


The  Man  and  the  Secret  29 

lawn,  she  stretched  out  her  arm  toward  him  and 
softly  shook  his  hat  at  him. 

"The  sun  sets  —  you  remember  how  many 
minutes  after  four,"  she  said,  with  no  other  tone 
than  that  of  quiet  warning.  "I  marked  the  min 
utes  in  the  almanac  for  you  the  other  night  after 
the  children  had  gone  to  bed,  so  that  you  would 
not  forget.  You  know  how  short  the  twilights 
are  even  when  the  day  is  clear.  It  is  cloudy 
to-day  and  there  will  not  be  any  twilight.  The 
children  said  they  would  not  be  at  home  until 
after  dark,  but  they  may  come  sooner;  it  may  be 
a  trick.  They  have  threatened  to  catch  us  this 
year  in  one  way  or  another,  and  you  know  they 
must  not  do  that  —  not  this  year !  There  must 
be  one  more  Christmas  with  all  its  old  ways  — 
even  if  it  must  be  without  its  old  mysteries." 

He  did  not  reply  at  once  and  then  not  rele 
vantly  : 

"I  heard  you  playing." 

He  had  dropped  his  head  forward  and  was 
scowling  at  her  from  under  his  brows  with  a  big 
Beethoven  brooding  scowl.  She  did  not  see,  for 
she  held  her  face  averted. 


30  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

The  silence  in  the  room  again  seemed  charged, 
and  there  was  greater  constraint  in  her  voice  when 
it  was  next  heard : 

"I  had  to  play;  you  need  not  have  listened." 

"I  had  to  listen;  you  played  loud  — " 

"I  did  not  know  I  was  playing  loud.  I  may 
have  been  trying  to  drown  other  sounds,"  she 
admitted. 

"What  other  sounds?"  His  voice  unexpect 
edly  became  inquisitorial:  it  was  a  frank  thrust 
into  the  unknown. 

"  Discords  —  possibly." 

"What  discords?"     His  thrust  became  deeper. 

She  turned  her  head  quickly  and  looked  at 
him;  a  quiver  passed  across  her  lips  and  in  her 
eyes  there  was  noble  anguish. 

But  nothing  so  arrests  our  speech  when  we  are 
tempted  to  betray  hidden  trouble  as  to  find  our 
selves  face  to  face  with  a  kind  of  burnished,  ra 
diant  happiness.  Sensitive  eyes  not  more  quickly 
close  before  a  blaze  of  sunlight  than  the  shadowy 
soul  shuts  her  gates  upon  the  advancing  Figure 
of  Joy. 

It  was  the  whole  familiar  picture  of  him  now  — 


The  Man  and  the  Secret  31 

triumphantly  painted  in  the  harmonies  of  life, 
masterfully  toned  to  subdue  its  discords  — 
that  drove  her  back  iato  herself.  When  she 
spoke  next,  she  had  regained  the  self-control 
which  under  his  unexpected  attack  she  had  come 
near  losing ;  and  her  words  issued  from  behind  the 
closed  gates  —  as  through  a  crevice  of  the  closed 
gates: 

"I  was  reading  one  of  the  new  books  that  came 
the  other  day,  the  deep  grave  ones  you  sent  for. 
It  is  written  by  a  deep  grave  German,  and  it  is 
worked  out  in  the  deep  grave  German  way. 
The  whole  purpose  of  it  is  to  show  that  any  woman 
in  the  life  of  any  man  is  merely  —  an  Incident. 
She  may  be  this  to  him,  she  may  be  that  to  him ; 
for  a  briefer  time,  for  a  greater  time;  but  all 
along  and  in  the  end,  at  bottom,  she  is  to  him  — 
an  Incident." 

He  did  not  take  his  eyes  from  hers  and  his 
smile  slowly  broadened. 

"  Were  those  the  discords?"  he  asked  gently. 

She  did  not  reply. 

He  turned  in  his  chair  and  looking  over  his 
shoulder  at  her,  he  raised  his  arm  and  drew  the 


32  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

point  of  his  pen  across  the  backs  of  a  stack  of 
magazines  on  top  of  his  desk. 

"Here  is  a  work,"  he  said,  "not  written  by  a 
German  or  by  any  other  man,  but  by  a  woman 
whose  race  I  do  not  know :  here  is  a  work  the  sole 
purpose  of  which  is  to  prove  that  any  man  is 
merely  an  Incident  in  the  life  of  any  woman. 
He  may  be  this  to  her,  he  may  be  that  to  her; 
for  a  briefer  time,  for  a  greater  time ;  but  all  along 
and  in  the  end,  beneath  everything  else,  he  is 
to  her  —  an  Incident." 

He  turned  and  confronted  her,  not  without  a 
gleam  of  humor  in  his  eyes. 

"That  did  not  trouble  me,"  he  said  tenderly. 
"Those  were  not  discords  to  me." 

Her  eyes  rested  on  his  face  with  inscrutable 
searching.  She  made  no  comment. 

His  own  face  grew  grave.  After  a  moment  of 
debate  with  himself  as  to  whether  he  should  be 
forced  to  do  a  thing  he  would  rather  not  do,  he 
turned  in  his  chair  and  laid  down  his  pen  as 
though  separating  himself  from  his  work.  Then 
he  said,  in  a  tone  that  ended  playfulness : 

"Do  I  not  understand?     Have  I  not  under- 


The  Man  and  the  Secret  33 

stood  all  the  time  ?  For  a  year  now  I  have  been 
shutting  myself  up  at  spare  hours  in  this  room 
and  at  this  work  —  without  any  explanation  to 
you.  Such  a  thing  never  occurred  before  in  our 
lives.  You  have  shared  everything.  I  have  re 
lied  upon  you  and  I  have  needed  you,  and  you 
have  never  failed  me.  And  this  apparently  has 
been  your  reward  —  to  be  rudely  shut  out  at  last. 
Now  you  come  in  and  I  tell  you  that  the  work  is 
done  —  quite  finished  —  without  a  word  to  you 
about  it.  Do  I  not  understand?"  he  repeated. 
"Have  I  not  understood  all  along?  It  is  true; 
outwardly  as  regards  this  work  you  have  been  — 
the  Incident." 

As  he  paused,  she  made  a  slight  gesture  with 
one  hand  as  though  she  did  not  care  for  what  he 
was  saying  and  brushed  away  the  fragile  web 
of  his  words  from  before  her  eyes  —  eyes  fixed 
on  larger  things  lying  clear  before  her  in  life's 
distance. 

He  went  quickly  on  with  deepening  emphasis: 

"But,  comrade  of  all  these  years,  battler  with 

me  for  life's  victories,  did   you  think  you  were 

never  to  know?     Did  you  believe  I  was  never  to 

D 


34  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

explain  ?  You  had  only  one  more  day  to  wait ! 
If  patience,  if  faith,  could  only  have  lasted  another 
twenty-four  hours  —  until  Christmas  Eve!" 

It  was  the  first  time  for  nearly  a  year  that  the 
sound  of  those  words  had  been  heard  in  that  house. 
He  bent  earnestly  over  toward  her;  he  leaned 
heavily  forward  with  his  hands  on  his  knees  and 
searched  her  features  with  loyal  chiding. 

"Has  not  Christmas  Eve  its  mysteries?"  he 
asked,  "its  secrets  for  you  and  me?  Think  of 
Christmas  Eve  for  you  and  me !  Remember !" 

Slowly  as  in  a  windless  woods  on  a  winter  day 
a  smoke  from  a  woodchopper's  smouldering  fire 
will  wander  off  and  wind  itself  about  the  hidden 
life-buds  of  a  young  tree,  muffling  it  while  the 
atmosphere  near  by  is  clear,  there  now  floated  into 
the  room  to  her  the  tender  haze  of  old  pledges 
and  vows  and  of  things  unutterably  sacred. 

He  noted  the  effect  of  his  words  and  did  not 
wait.  He  turned  to  his  desk  and,  gathering  up 
the  sprigs  of  holly  and  cedar,  began  softly  to  cover 
her  picture  with  them. 

"Stay  blinded  and  bewildered  there,"  he  said, 
"until  the  hour  comes  when  holly  and  cedar  will 


The  Man  and  the  Secret  35 

speak:  on  Christmas  Eve  you  will  understand; 
you  will  then  see  whether  in  this  w  ork  you  have 
been  —  the  Incident." 

Even  while  they  had  been  talking  the  light  of 
the  short  winter  afternoon  had  perceptibly  waned 
in  the  room. 

She  glanced  through  the  windows  at  the  dark 
ening  lawn;  her  eyes  were  tear-dimmed;  to  her  it 
looked  darker  than  it  was.  She  held  his  hat  up 
between  her  arms,  making  an  arch  for  him  to 
come  and  stand  under. 

"It  is  getting  late,"  she  said  in  nearly  the  same 
tone  of  quiet  warning  with  which  she  had  spoken 
before.  "There  is  no  time  to  lose." 

He  sprang  up,  without  glancing  behind  him  at 
his  desk  with  its  interrupted  work,  and  came  over 
and  placed  himself  under  the  arch  of  her  arms, 
looking  at  her  reverently. 

But  his  hands  did  not  take  hold,  his  arms  hung 
down  at  his  sides  —  the  hands  that  were  life,  the 
arms  that  were  love. 

She  let  her  eyes  wander  over  his  clipped  tawny 
hair  and  pass  downward  over  his  features  to  the 
well-remembered  mouth  under  its  mustache. 


36  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

Then,  closing  her  quivering  lips  quickly,  she 
dropped  the  hat  softly  on  his  head  and  walked 
toward  the  door.  When  she  reached  it,  she  put 
out  one  of  her  hands  delicately  against  a  panel 
and  turned  her  profile  over  her  shoulder  to  him : 

"  Do  you  know  what  is  the  trouble  with  both  of 
those  books?"  she  asked,  with  a  struggling  sweet 
ness  in  her  voice. 

He  had  caught  up  his  overcoat  and  as  he  put 
one  arm  through  the  sleeve  with  a  vigorous  thrust, 
he  laughed  out  with  his  mouth  behind  the  collar : 

"I  think  I  know  what  is  the  trouble  with  the 
authors  of  the  books." 

"The  trouble  is,"  she  replied,  "the  trouble 
is  that  the  authors  are  right  and  the  books  are 
right:  men  and  women  are  only  Incidents  to 
each  other  in  life,"  and  she  passed  out  into  the 
hall. 

"Human  life  itself  for  that  matter  is  only  an 
incident  in  the  universe,"  he  replied,  "if  we  cared 
to  look  at  it  in  that  way;  but  we'd  better  not !" 

He  was  standing  near  the  table  in  the  middle  of 
the  room ;  he  suddenly  stopped  buttoning  his  over 
coat.  His  eyes  began  to  wander  over  the  books, 


The  Man  and  the  Secret  37 

the  prints,  the  pictures,  embracing  in  a  final  survey 
everything  that  he  had  brought  together  from 
such  distances  of  place  and  time.  His  work  was 
in  effect  done.  A  sense  of  regret,  a  rush  of  lone 
liness,  came  over  him  as  it  comes  upon  all  of  us 
who  reach  the  happy  ending  of  toil  that  we  have 
put  our  heart  and  strength  in. 

"Are  you  coming?"  she  called  faintly  from  the 
hall. 

"  I  am  coming,"  he  replied,  and  moved  toward 
the  door;  but  there  he  stopped  again  and  looked 
back. 

Once  more  there  came  into  his  face  the  devotion 
of  the  student ;  he  was  on  the  commons  where  the 
race  encamps;  he  was  brother  to  all  brothers 
who  join  work  to  work  for  common  good.  He 
was  feeling  for  the  moment  that  through  his  hands 
ran  the  long  rope  of  the  world  at  which  men  — 
like  a  crew  of  sailors  —  tug  at  the  Ship  of  Life, 
trying  to  tow  her  into  some  divine  haven. 

His  task  was  ended.  Would  it  be  of  service? 
Would  it  carry  any  message?  Would  it  kindle 
in  American  homes  some  new  light  of  truth,  with 
the  eyes  of  mothers  and  fathers  fixed  upon  it, 


38  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

and  innumerable  children  of  the  future  the  better 
for  its  shining  ? 

"  Are  you  coming  ?  "  she  called  more  quiveringly. 

"I  am  coming,"  he  called  back,  breaking  away 
from  his  revery,  and  raising  his  voice  so  it  would 
surely  reach  her. 


THE   TREE   AND   THE   SUNSET 


II 

THE    TREE    AND    THE    SUNSET 

HE  had  quitted  the  house  and,  hav 
ing  taken  a  few  steps  across  the 
short  frozen  grass  of  the  yard  as 
one  walks  lingeringly  when  expecting 
to  be  joined  by  a  companion,  she 
turned  and  stood  with  her  eyes  fixed  on  the  door 
way  for  his  emerging  figure. 

"  To-morrow  night,"  he  had  said,  smiling  at 
her  with  one  meaning  in  his  words,  "  to-morrow 
night  you  will  understand." 

"Yes,"  she  now  said  to  herself,  with  another 
meaning  in  hers,  "to-morrow  night  I  must  under 
stand.  Until  to-morrow  night,  then,  blinded 
and  bewildered  with  holly  and  cedar  let  me  be ! 
Kind  ignorance,  enfold  me  and  spare  me !  All 
happiness  that  I  can  control  or  conjecture,  come 
to  me  and  console  me !" 

And  over   herself    she    dropped  a  vesture  of 
joy  to  greet  him  when  he  should  step  forth. 
41 


42  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

It  was  a  pleasant  afternoon  to  be  out  of  doors 
and  to  go  about  what  they  had  planned;  the 
ground  was  scarcely  frozen,  there  was  no  wind, 
and  the  whole  sky  was  overcast  with  thin  gray 
cloud  that  betrayed  no  movement.  Under  this 
still  dome  of  silvery- violet  light  stretched  the  winter 
land;  it  seemed  ready  and  waiting  for  its  great 
festival. 

The  lawn  sloped  away  from  the  house  to  a 
brook  at  the  bottom,  and  beyond  the  brook  the 
ground  rose  to  a  woodland  hilltop.  Across  the 
distance  you  distinguished  there  the  familiar  trees 
of  blue-grass  pastures :  white  ash  and  black  ash ; 
white  oak  and  red  oak;  white  walnut  and  black 
walnut ;  and  the  scaly-bark  hickory  in  his  rough 
ness  and  the  sycamore  with  her  soft  leoparded 
limbs.  The  black  walnut  and  the  hickory 
brought  to  mind  autumn  days  when  children 
were  abroad,  ploughing  the  myriad  leaves  with 
booted  feet  and  gathering  their  harvest  of  nuts  — 
primitive  food-storing  instinct  of  the  human 
animal  still  rampant  in  modern  childhood :  these 
nuts  to  be  put  away  in  garret  and  cellar  and  but 
scantily  eaten  until  Christmas  came. 


The  Tree  and  the  Sunset  43 

Out  of  this  woods  on  the  afternoon  air  sounded 
the  muffled  strokes  of  an  axe  cutting  down  a 
black  walnut  partly  dead;  and  when  this  fell,  it 
would  bring  down  with  it  bunches  of  mistletoe, 
those  white  pearls  of  the  forest  mounted  on 
branching  jade.  To-morrow  eager  fingers  would 
be  gathering  the  mistletoe  to  decorate  the  house. 
Near  by  was  a  thicket  of  bramble  and  cane  where, 
out  of  reach  of  cattle,  bushes  of  holly  thrived: 
the  same  fingers  would  be  gathering  that. 

Bordering  this  woods  on  one  side  lay  a  corn 
field.  The  corn  had  just  been  shucked,  and 
beside  each  shock  of  fodder  lay  its  heap  of  ears 
ready  for  the  gathering  wagon.  The  sight  of  the 
corn  brought  freshly  to  remembrance  the  red- 
ambered  home-brew  of  the  land  which  runs  in  a 
genial  torrent  through  all  days  and  nights  of  the 
year  —  many  a  full-throated  rill  —  but  never  with 
so  inundating  a  movement  as  at  this  season. 
And  the  same  grain  suggested  also  the  smoke 
houses  of  all  farms,  in  which  larded  porkers, 
fattened  by  it,  had  taken  on  posthumous  honors 
as  home-cured  hams;  and  in  which  up  under  the 
black  rafters  home-made  sausages  were  being 


44  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

smoked  to  their  needed  flavor  over  well-chosen 
chips. 

Around  one  heap  of  ears  a  flock  of  home-grown 
turkeys,  red-mottled,  rainbow-necked,  were  feed 
ing  for  their  fate. 

On  the  other  side  of  the  woods  stretched  a 
wheat-field,  in  the  stubble  of  which  coveys  of  bob- 
whites  were  giving  themselves  final  plumpness  for 
the  table  by  picking  up  grains  of  wheat  which  had 
dropped  into  the  drills  at  harvest  time  or  other 
seeds  which  had  ripened  in  the  autumn  aftermath. 

Farther  away  on  the  landscape  there  was  a 
hemp-field  where  hemp-breakers  were  making  a 
rattling  reedy  music;  during  these  weeks  wagons 
loaded  with  the  gold-bearing  fibre  begin  to  move 
creaking  to  the  towns,  helping  to  fill  the  farmer's 
pockets  with  holiday  largess. 

Thus  everything  needed  for  Christmas  was 
there  in  sight :  the  mistletoe  —  the  holly  —  the 
liquor  of  the  land  for  the  cups  of  hearty  men  — 
the  hams  and  the  sausages  of  fastidious  house 
wives  —  the  turkey  and  the  quail  —  and  crops 
transmutable  into  coin.  They  were  in  sight  there 
—  the  fair  maturings  of  the  sun  now  ready  to  be 


The  Tree  and  the  Sunset  45 

turned  into  offerings  to  the  dark  solstice, 
the  low  activities  of  the  soil  uplifted  to  human 
joyance. 

One  last  thing  completed  the  picture  of  the 
scene. 

The  brook  that  wound  across  the  lawn  at  its 
bottom  was  frozen  to-day  and  lay  like  a  band  of 
jewelled  samite  trailed  through  the  olive  verdure. 
Along  its  margin  evergreens  grew.  No  pine  nor 
spruce  nor  larch  nor  fir  is  native  to  these  portions 
of  the  Shield;  only  the  wild  cedar,  the  shapeless 
and  the  shapely,  belongs  there.  This  assemblage 
of  evergreens  was  not,  then,  one  of  the  bounties 
of  Nature ;  they  had  been  planted. 

It  was  the  slender  tapering  spires  of  these  ever 
greens  with  their  note  of  deathless  spring  that 
mainly  caught  the  eye  on  the  whole  landscape 
this  dead  winter  day.  Under  the  silvery-violet 
light  of  the  sky  they  waited  in  beauty  and  in 
peace :  the  pale  green  of  larch  and  spruce  which 
seems  always  to  go  with  the  freshness  of  dripping 
Aprils;  the  dim  blue-gray  of  pines  which  rather 
belongs  to  far- vaulted  summer  skies;  and  the 
dark  green  of  firs  —  true  comfortable  winter 


46  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

coat  when  snows  sift  mournfully  and  icicles  are 
spearing  earthward. 

These  evergreens  likewise  had  their  Christmas 
meaning  and  finished  the  picture  of  the  giving 
earth.  Unlike  the  other  things,  they  satisfied  no 
appetite,  they  were  ministers  to  no  passions;  but 
with  them  the  Christmas  of  the  intellect  began: 
the  human  heart  was  to  drape  their  boughs  with 
its  gentle  poetry ;  and  from  their  ever  living  spires 
the  spiritual  hope  of  humanity  would  take  its 
flight  toward  the  eternal. 

Thus  then  the  winter  land  waited  for  the  on 
coming  of  that  strange  travelling  festival  of  the 
world  which  has  roved  into  it  and  encamped  gypsy- 
like  from  old  lost  countries :  the  festival  that  takes 
toll  of  field  and  wood,  of  hoof  and  wing,  of  cup 
and  loaf;  but  that,  best  of  all,  wrings  from  the 
nature  of  man  its  reluctant  tenderness  for  his 
fellows  and  builds  out  of  his  lonely  doubts  re 
garding  this  life  his  faith  in  a  better  one. 

And  central  on  this  whole  silent  scene  —  the 
highest  element  in  it  —  its  one  winter-red  passion 
flower  —  the  motionless  woman  waiting  outside 
the  house. 


The  Tree  and  the  Sunset  47 

At  last  he  came  out  upon  the  step. 

He  cast  a  quick  glance  toward  the  sky  as  though 
his  first  thought  were  of  what  the  weather  was 
going  to  be.  Then  as  he  buttoned  the  top  button 
of  his  overcoat  and  pressed  his  bearded  chin  down 
over  it  to  make  it  more  comfortable  under  his 
short  neck,  with  his  other  hand  he  gave  a  little 
pull  at  his  hat  —  the  romantic  country  hat ;  and 
he  peeped  out  from  under  the  rustic  brim  at  her, 
smiling  with  old  gayeties  and  old  fondnesses.  He 
bulked  so  rotund  inside  his  overcoat  and  looked 
so  short  under  the  flat  headgear  that  her  first 
thought  was  how  slight  a  disguise  every  year 
turned  him  into  a  good  family  Santa  Claus;  and 
she  smiled  back  at  him  with  the  same  gayeties 
and  fondnesses  of  days  gone  by.  But  such  a 
deeper  pang  pierced  her  that  she  turned  away  and 
walked  hurriedly  down  the  hill  toward  the  ever 
greens. 

He  was  quickly  at  her  side.  She  could  feel  how 
animal  youth  in  him  released  itself  the  moment 
he  had  come  into  the  open  air.  There  was  brutal 
vitality  in  the  way  his  shoes  crushed  the  frozen 
ground ;  and  as  his  overcoat  sleeve  rubbed  against 


48  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

her  arm,  there  was  the  same  leaping  out  of  life, 
like  the  rubbing  of  tinder  against  tinder.  Half 
way  down  the  lawn  he  halted  and  laid  his  hand 
heavily  on  her  wrist. 

"Listen   to   that!"   he  said.     His   voice  was 
eager,  excited,  like  a  boy's. 

On  the  opposite  side  of  the  house,  several  hun 
dred  yards  away,  the  country  turnpike  ran;  and 
from  this  there  now  reached  them  the  rumbling 
of  many  vehicles,  hurrying  in  close  procession  out 
of  the  nearest  town  and  moving  toward  smaller 
villages  scattered  over  the  country ;  to  its  hamlets 
and  cross-roads  and  hundreds  of  homes  richer  or 
poorer  —  every  vehicle  Christmas-laden :  sign 
and  foretoken  of  the  Southern  Yule-tide.  There 
were  matters  and  usages  in  those  American  car 
riages  and  buggies  and  wagons  and  carts  the 
history  of  which  went  back  to  the  England  of 
the  Georges  and  the  Stuarts  and  the  Henrys; 
to  the  England  of  Elizabeth,  to  the  England  of 
Chaucer;  back  through  robuster  Saxon  times  to 
the  gaunt  England  of  Alfred,  and  on  beyond  this 
till  they  were  lost  under  the  forest  glooms  of 
Druidical  Britain. 


The  Tree  and  the  Sunset  49 

They  stood  looking  into  each  other's  eyes  and 
gathering  into  their  ears  the  festal  uproar  of  the 
turnpike.  How  well  they  knew  what  it  all  meant 
—  this  far-flowing  tide  of  bounteousness  !  How 
perfectly  they  saw  the  whole  picture  of  the  town 
out  of  which  the  vehicles  had  come :  the  atmosphere 
of  it  already  darkened  by  the  smoke  of  soft  coal 
pouring  from  its  chimneys,  so  that  twilight  in  it 
had  already  begun  to  fall  ahead  of  twilight  out.  in 
the  country,  and  lamp-posts  to  glimmer  along  the 
little  streets,  and  shops  to  be  illuminated  to  the  de 
light  of  window-gazing,  mystery-loving  children  — 
wild  with  their  holiday  excitements  and  secrecies. 
Somewhere  in  the  throng  their  own  two  children 
were  busy  unless  they  had  already  started  home. 

For  years  he  had  held  a  professorship  in  the 
college  in  this  town,  driving  in  and  out  from  his 
home;  but  with  the  close  of  this  academic  year 
he  was  to  join  the  slender  file  of  Southern  men  who 
have  been  called  to  Northern  universities:  this 
change  would  mean  the  end  of  life  here.  Both 
thought  of  this  now  —  of  the  last  Christmas  in 
the  house ;  and  with  the  same  impulse  they  turned 
their  gaze  back  to  it. 


tjo  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

More  than  half  a  century  ago  the  one  starved 
genius  of  the  Shield,  a  writer  of  songs,  looked  out 
upon  the  summer  picture  of  this  land,  its  meadows 
and  ripening  corn  tops;  and  as  one  presses  out 
the  spirit  of  an  entire  vineyard  when  he  bursts  a 
solitary  grape  upon  his  tongue,  he,  the  song  writer, 
drained  drop  by  drop  the  wine  of  that  scene  into 
the  notes  of  a  single  melody.  The  nation  now 
knows  his  song,  the  world  knows  it  —  the  only 
music  that  has  ever  captured  the  joy  and  peace 
of  American  home  life  —  embodying  the  very 
soul  of  it  in  the  clear  amber  of  sound. 

This  house  was  one  of  such  homesteads  as  the 
genius  sang  of:  a  low,  old-fashioned,  brown- 
walled,  gray-shingled  house;  with  chimneys 
generous,  with  green  window-shutters  less  than 
green  and  white  window-sills  less  than  white; 
with  feudal  vines  giving  to  its  walls  their  summery 
allegiance;  not  young,  not  old,  but  standing  in 
the  middle  years  of  its  strength  and  its  honors; 
not  needy,  not  wealthy,  but  answering  Agar's 
prayer  for  neither  poverty  nor  riches. 

The  two  stood  on  the  darkening  lawn,  looking 
back  at  it. 


The  Tree  and  the  Sunset  51 

It  had  been  the  house  of  his  fathers.  He  had 
brought  her  to  it  as  his  own  on  the  afternoon  of 
their  wedding  several  miles  away  across  the 
country.  They  had  arrived  at  dark;  and  as  she 
had  sat  beside  him  in  the  carriage,  one  of  his 
arms  around  her  and  his  other  hand  enfolding 
both  of  hers,  she  had  first  caught  sight  of  it  through 
the  forest  trees  —  waiting  for  her  with  its  lights 
just  lit,  its  warmth,  its  privacies:  and  that  had 
been  Christmas  Eve ! 

For  her  wedding  day  had  been  Christmas 
Eve.  When  she  had  announced  her  choice  of  a 
day,  they  had  chidden  her.  But  with  girlish  wil- 
fulness  she  had  clung  to  it  the  more  positively. 

"It  is  the  most  beautiful  night  of  the  year!" 
she  had  replied,  brushing  their  objection  aside 
with  that  reason  alone.  "  And  it  is  the  happiest ! 
I  will  be  married  on  that  night,  when  I  am  hap 
piest!" 

Alone  and  thinking  it  over,  she  had  uttered 
other  words  to  herself  —  yet  scarce  uttered  them, 
rather  felt  them : 

"  Of  old  it  was  written  how  on  Christmas  Night 
the  Love  that  cannot  fail  us  became  human. 


52  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

My  love  for  him,  which  is  the  divine  thing  in  my 
life  and  which  is  never  to  fail  him,  shall  become 
human  to  him  on  that  night." 

When  the  carriage  had  stopped  at  the  front 
porch,  he  had  led  her  into  the  house  between  the 
proud  smiling  servants  of  his  establishment  ranged 
at  a  respectful  distance  on  each  side ;  and  without 
surrendering  her  even  to  her  maid  —  a  new  spirit 
of  silence  on  him  —  he  had  led  her  to  her  bed 
room,  to  a  place  on  the  carpet  under  the  chande 
lier. 

Leaving  her  there,  he  had  stepped  backward 
and  surveyed  her  waiting  in  her  youth  and  love 
liness  — for  him;  come  into  his  house,  into  his 
arms  —  his;  no  other's — never  while  life  lasted 
to  be  another's  even  in  thought  or  in  desire. 

Then  as  if  the  marriage  ceremony  of  the  after 
noon  in  the  presence  of  many  had  meant  nothing 
and  this  were  the  first  moment  when  he  could 
gather  her  home  to  him,  he  had  come  forward 
and  taken  her  in  his  arms  and  set  upon  her  the 
kiss  of  his  house  and  his  ardor  and  his  duty.  As 
his  warm  breath  broke  close  against  her  face,  his 
lips  under  their  mustache,  almost  boyish  then, 


The   Tree  and  the  Sunset  53 

had  thoughtlessly  formed  one  little  phrase — one 
little  but  most  lasting  and  fateful  phrase : 

"Bride  of  the  Mistletoe!" 

Looking  up  with  a  smile,  she  saw  that  she  stood 
under  a  bunch  of  mistletoe  swung  from  the 
chandelier. 

Straightway  he  had  forgotten  his  own  words, 
nor  did  he  ever  afterwards  know  that  he  had 
used  them.  But  she,  out  of  their  very  sacredness 
as  the  first  words  he  had  spoken  to  her  in  his  home, 
had  remembered  them  most  clingingly.  More 
than  remembered  them:  she  had  set  them  to 
grow  down  into  the  fibres  of  her  heart  as  the  mistle 
toe  roots  itself  upon  the  life-sap  of  the  tree.  And 
in  all  the  later  years  they  had  been  the  green  spot 
of  verdure  under  life's  dark  skies  —  the  undying 
bough  into  which  the  spirit  of  the  whole  tree  re 
treats  from  the  ice  of  the  world : 

"Bride  of  the  Mistletoe!" 

Through  the  first  problem  of  learning  to  weld 
her  nature  to  his  wisely;  through  the  perils  of 
bearing  children  and  the  agony  of  seeing  some  of 
them  pass  away;  through  the  ambition  of  having 
him  rise  in  his  profession  and  through  the  ideal 


54  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

of  making  his  home  an  earthly  paradise ;  through 
loneliness  when  he  was  away  and  joy  whenever 
he  came  back,  —  upon  her  whole  life  had  rested 
the  wintry  benediction  of  that  mystical  phrase : 
"  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe  1 " 

She  turned  away  now,  starting  once  more  down 
ward  toward  the  evergreens.  He  was  quickly 
at  her  side. 

"What  do  you  suppose  Harold  and  Elizabeth 
are  up  to  about  this  time?"  he  asked,  with  a 
good-humored  jerk  of  his  head  toward  the  distant 
town. 

"At  least  to  something  mischievous,  whatever 
it  is,"  she  replied.  "They  begged  to  be  allowed 
to  stay  until  the  shop  windows  were  lighted ;  they 
have  seen  the  shop  windows  two  or  three  times 
already  this  week:  there  is  no  great  marvel  for 
them  now  in  shop  windows.  Permission  to  stay 
late  may  be  a  blind  to  come  home  early.  They 
are  determined,  from  what  I  have  overheard, 
to  put  an  end  this  year  to  the  parental  house 
mysteries  of  Christmas.  They  are  crossing  the 
boundary  between  the  first  childhood  and  the 


The  Tree  and  the  Sunset  55 

second.  But  if  it  be  possible,  I  wish  everything 
to  be  kept  once  more  just  as  it  has  always  been; 
let  it  be  so  for  my  sake ! " 

"And  I  wish  it  for  your  sake,"  he  replied 
heartily;  "and  for  my  purposes." 

After  a  moment  of  silence  he  asked:  "How 
large  a  Tree  must  it  be  this  year?" 

"It  will  have  to  be  large,"  she  replied;  and  she 
began  to  count  those  for  whom  the  Tree  this  year 
was  meant. 

First  she  called  the  names  of  the  two  children 
they  had  lost.  Gifts  for  these  were  every  year 
hung  on  the  boughs.  She  mentioned  their  names 
now,  and  then  she  continued  counting: 

"Harold  and  Elizabeth  are  four.  You  and  I 
make  six.  After  the  family  come  Herbert  and 
Elsie,  your  best  friend  the  doctor's  children. 
Then  the  servants  —  long  strong  bottom  branches 
for  the  servants!  Allow  for  the  other  children 
who  are  to  make  up  the  Christmas  party:  ten 
children  have  been  invited,  ten  children  have 
accepted,  ten  children  will  arrive.  The  ten  will 
bring  with  them  some  unimportant  parents;  you 
can  judge." 


56  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

"That  will  do  for  size,"  he  said,  laughing. 
"  Now  the  kind :  spruce  —  larch  —  hemlock  — 
pine  —  which  shall  it  be?" 

"  It  shall  be  none  of  them !"  she  answered,  after 
a  little  waiting.  "It  shall  be  the  Christmas  Tree 
of  the  uttermost  North  where  the  reindeer  are 
harnessed  and  the  Great  White  Sleigh  starts  — 
fir.  The  old  Christmas  stories  like  fir  best.  Old 
faiths  seem  to  lodge  in  it  longest.  And  deepest 
mystery  darkens  the  heart  of  it,"  she  added. 

"Fir  it  shall  be !  "  he  said.     "Choose  the  tree." 

"I  have  chosen." 

She  stopped  and  delicately  touched  his  wrist 
with  the  finger  tips  of  one  white-gloved  hand, 
bidding  him  stand  beside  her. 

"  That  one,"  she  said,  pointing  down. 

The  brook,  watering  the  roots  of  the  evergreens 
in  summer  gratefully,  but  now  lying  like  a  band 
of  samite,  jewel-crusted,  made  a  loop  near  the 
middle  point  of  the  lawn,  creating  a  tiny  island; 
and  on  this  island,  aloof  from  its  fellows  and  with 
space  for  the  growth  of  its  boughs,  stood  a  perfect 
fir  tree:  strong-based,  thick-set,  tapering  fault 
lessly,  star-pointed,  gathering  more  youth  as  it 


The   Tree  and  the  Sunset  57 

gathered  more  years — a  tame  dweller  on  the  lawn 
but  descended  from  forests  blurred  with  wildness 
and  lapped  by  low  washings  of  the  planet's  pri 
meval  ocean. 

At  each  Christmas  for  several  years  they  had 
been  tempted  to  cut  this  tree,  but  had  spared  it 
for  its  conspicuous  beauty  at  the  edge  of  the 
thicket. 

"That  one,"  she  now  said,  pointing  down. 
"This  is  the  last  time.  Let  us  have  the  best  of 
things  while  we  may !  Is  it  not  always  the  per 
fect  that  is  demanded  for  sacrifice?" 

His  glance  had  already  gone  forward  eagerly 
to  the  tree,  and  he  started  toward  it. 

Descending,  they  stepped  across  the  brook  to 
the  island  and  went  up  close  to  the  fir.  With 
a  movement  not  unobserved  by  her  he  held  out 
his  hand  and  clasped  three  green  fingers  of  a  low 
bough  which  the  fir  seemed  to  stretch  out  to  him 
recognizingly.  (She  had  always  realized  the 
existence  of  some  intimate  bond  between  him 
and  the  forest.)  His  face  now  filled  with  mean 
ings  she  did  not  share;  the  spell  of  the  secret 
work  had  followed  him  out  of  the  house  down  to 


58  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

the  trees;  incommunicable  silence  shut  him  in. 
A  moment  later  his  fingers  parted  with  the  green 
fingers  of  the  fir  and  he  moved  away  from  her  side, 
starting  around  the  tree  and  studying  it  as  though 
in  delight  of  fresh  knowledge.  So  she  watched 
him  pass  around  to  the  other  side. 

When  he  came  back  where  he  had  started,  she 
was  not  there.  He  looked  around  searchingly; 
her  figure  was  nowhere  in  sight. 

He  stood  —  waiting. 

The  valley  had  memories,  what  memories! 
The  years  came  close  together  here;  they  clus 
tered  as  thickly  as  the  trees  themselves.  Vacant 
spots  among  them  marked  where  the  Christmas 
Trees  of  former  years  had  been  cut  down.  Some 
of  the  Trees  had  been  for  the  two  children  they 
had  lost.  This  wandering  trail  led  hither  and 
thither  back  to  the  first  Tree  for  the  first  child: 
he  had  stooped  down  and  cut  that  close  to  the 
ground  with  his  mere  penknife.  When  it  had 
been  lighted,  it  had  held  only  two  or  three  candles ; 
and  the  candle  on  the  top  of  it  had  flared  level 
into  the  infant's  hand-shaded  eyes. 

He  knew  that  she  was  making  through  the 


The  Tree  and  the  Sunset  59 

evergreens  a  Pilgrimage  of  the  Years,  walking 
there  softly  and  alone  with  the  feet  of  life's  Pities 
and  a  mother's  Constancies. 

He  waited  for  her  —  motionless. 

The  stillness  of  the  twilight  rested  on  the  valley 
now.  Only  from  the  trees  came  the  plaintive 
twittering  of  birds  which  had  come  in  from 
frozen  weeds  and  fence-rows  and  at  the  thresholds 
of  the  boughs  were  calling  to  one  another.  It  was 
not  their  song,  but  their  speech ;  there  was  no  love 
in  it,  but  there  was  what  for  them  perhaps  corre 
sponds  to  our  sense  of  ties.  It  most  resembled  in 
human  life  the  brief  things  that  two  people,  having 
long  lived  together,  utter  to  each  other  when  to 
gether  in  a  room  they  prepare  for  the  night :  there 
is  no  anticipation ;  it  is  a  confession  of  the  uncon- 
fessed.  About  him  now  sounded  this  low  winter 
music  from  the  far  boundary  of  other  lives. 

He  did  not  hear  it. 

The  light  on  the  landscape  had  changed.  The 
sun  was  setting  and  a  splendor  began  to  spread 
along  the  sky  and  across  the  land.  It  laid  a 
glory  on  the  roof  of  the  house  on  the  hill ;  it  smote 
the  edge  of  the  woodland  pasture,  burnishing  with 


60  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

copper  the  gray  domes;  it  shone  faintly  on  dis 
tant  corn  shocks,  on  the  weather-dark  tents  of 
the  hemp  at  bivouac  soldierly  and  grim.  At 
his  feet  it  sparkled  in  rose  gleams  on  the  samite 
of  the  brook  and  threw  burning  shafts  into  the 
gloom  of  the  fir  beside  him. 

He  did  not  see  it. 

He  did  not  hear  the  calling  of  the  birds  about 
his  ears,  he  did  not  see  the  sunset  before  his  eyes, 
he  did  not  feel  the  fir  tree  the  boughs  of  which 
stuck  against  his  side. 

He  stood  there  as  still  as  a  rock  —  with  his 
secret.  Not  the  secret  of  the  year's  work,  which 
was  to  be  divulged  to  his  wife  and  through  her 
to  the  world ;  but  the  secret  which  for  some  years 
had  been  growing  in  his  life  and  which  would, 
he  hoped,  never  grow  into  the  open  —  to  be  seen 
of  her  and  of  all  men. 

The  sentimental  country  hat  now  looked  as 
though  it  might  have  been  worn  purposely  to 
help  out  a  disguise,  as  the  more  troubled  man 
behind  the  scenes  makes  up  to  be  the  happier 
clown.  It  became  an  absurdity,  a  mockery,  above 
his  face  grave,  stern,  set  of  jaw  and  eye.  He 


The  Tree  and  the  Sunset  6 1 

was  no  longer  the  student  buried  among  his  books 
nor  human  brother  to  toiling  brothers.  He  had 
not  the  slightest  thought  of  service  to  mankind 
left  in  him,  he  was  but  a  man  himself  with  enough 
to  think  of  in  the  battle  between  his  own  will  and 
blood. 

And  behind  him  among  the  dark  evergreens 
went  on  that  Pilgrimage  of  the  Years  —  with  the 
feet  of  the  Pities  and  the  Constancies. 

Moments  passed;  he  did  not  stir.  Then  there 
was  a  slight  noise  on  the  other  side  of  the  tree,  and 
his  nature  instantly  stepped  back  into  his  outward 
place.  He  looked  through  the  boughs.  She  had 
returned  and  was  standing  with  her  face  also 
turned  toward  the  sunset;  it  was  very  pale,  very 
still. 

Such  darkness  had  settled  on  the  valley  now 
that  the  green  she  wore  blent  with  the  green  of 
the  fir.  He  saw  only  her  white  face  and  her  white 
hands  so  close  to  the  branches  that  they  appeared 
to  rest  upon  them,  to  grow  out  of  them :  he  sadly 
thought  of  one  of  his  prints  of  Egypt  of  old  and  of 
the  Lady  of  the  Sacred  Tree.  Her  long  back 
ward-sweeping  plume  of  green  also  blent  with  the 


62  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

green  of  the  fir  —  shade  to  shade  —  and  only  the 
coral  tip  of  it  remained  strongly  visible.  This 
matched  the  last  coral  in  the  sunset ;  and  it  seemed 
to  rest  ominously  above  her  head  as  a  finger-point 
of  the  fading  light  of  Nature. 

He  went  quickly  around  to  her.  He  locked  his 
arms  around  her  and  drew  her  close  and  held  her 
close;  and  thus  for  a  while  the  two  stood,  watching 
the  flame  on  the  altar  of  the  world  as  it  sank  lower, 
leaving  emptiness  and  ashes. 

Once  she  put  out  a  hand  and  with  a  gesture 
full  of  majesty  and  nobleness  waved  farewell  to 
the  dying  fire. 

Still  without  a  word  he  took  his  arms  from 
around  her  and  turned  energetically  to  the  tree. 

He  pressed  the  lowest  boughs  aside  and  made 
his  way  in  close  to  the  trunk  and  struck  it  with  a 
keen  stroke. 

The  fir  as  he  drew  the  axe  out  made  at  its  gashed 
throat  a  sound  like  that  of  a  butchered,  blood- 
strangled  creature  trying  to  cry  out  too  late  against 
a  treachery.  A  horror  ran  through  the  boughs; 
the  thousands  of  leaves  were  jarred  by  the  death- 
strokes;  and  the  top  of  it  rocked  like  a  splendid 


The  Tree  and  the  Sunset  63 

plume  too  rudely  treated  in  a  storm.  Then  it 
fell  over  on  its  side,  bridging  blackly  the  white 
ice  of  the  brook. 

Stooping,  he  lifted  it  triumphantly.  He  set 
the  butt-end  on  one  of  his  shoulders  and,  stretching 
his  arms  up,  grasped  the  trunk  and  held  the  tree 
straight  in  the  air,  so  that  it  seemed  to  be  growing 
out  of  his  big  shoulder  as  out  of  a  ledge  of  rock. 
Then  he  turned  to  her  and  laughed  out  in  his 
strength  and  youth.  She  laughed  joyously  back 
at  him,  glorying  as  he  did. 

With  a  robust  re-shouldering  of  the  tree  to 
make  it  more  comfortable  to  carry,  he  turned  and 
started  up  the  hill  toward  the  house.  As  she 
followed  behind,  the  old  mystery  of  the  woods 
seemed  at  last  to  have  taken  bodily  possession  of 
him.  The  fir  was  riding  on  his  shoulder,  its  arms 
met  fondly  around  his  neck,  its  fingers  were  caress 
ing  his  hair.  And  it  whispered  back  jeeringly 
to  her  through  the  twilight : 

"Say  farewell  to  him!  He  was  once  yours; 
he  is  yours  no  longer.  He  dandles  the  child  of 
the  forest  on  his  shoulder  instead  of  his  children 
by  you  in  the  house.  He  belongs  to  Nature;  and 


64  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

as  Nature  calls,  he  will  always  follow  —  though 
it  should  lead  over  the  precipice  or  into  the  flood. 
Once  Nature  called  him  to  you:  remember  how 
he  broke  down  barriers  until  he  won  you.  Now 
he  is  yours  no  longer  —  say  good-by  to  him  !" 

With  an  imbued  terror  and  desolation,  she 
caught  up  with  him.  By  a  movement  so  soft 
that  he  should  not  be  aware,  she  plucked  him  by 
the  coat  sleeve  on  the  other  side  from  the  fir  and 
held  on  to  him  as  he  strode  on  in  careless  joy. 

Halfway  up  the  hill  lights  began  to  flash  from 
the  windows  of  the  house:  a  servant  was  bring 
ing  in  the  lamps.  It  was  at  this  hour,  in  just  this 
way,  that  she  had  first  caught  sight  of  them  on 
that  Christmas  Eve  when  he  had  brought  her 
home  after  the  wedding. 

She  hurried  around  in  front  of  him,  wishing  to 
read  the  expression  of  his  eyes  by  the  distant 
gleams  from  the  windows.  Would  they  have 
nothing  to  say  to  her  about  those  winter  twilight 
lamps  ?  Did  he,  too,  not  remember  ? 

His  head  and  face  were  hidden;  a  thousand 
small  spears  of  Nature  bristled  between  him  and 
her;  but  he  laughed  out  to  her  from  behind  the 
rampart  of  the  green  spears. 


The   Tree  and  the  Sunset  65 

At  that  moment  a  low  sound  in  the  distance 
drew  her  attention,  and  instantly  alert  she  paused 
to  listen.  Then,  forgetting  everything  else,  she 
called  to  him  with  a  rush  of  laughter  like  that  of 
her  mischief-loving  girlhood : 

"Quick!  There  they  are!  I  heard  the  gate 
shut  at  the  turnpike !  They  must  not  catch  us ! 
Quick!  Quick!" 

"Hurry,  then!"  he  cried,  as  he  ran  forward, 
joining  his  laughter  to  hers.  "Open  the  door 
for  me!" 

After  this  the  night  fell  fast.  The  only 
sounds  to  be  heard  in  the  valley  were  the  minute 
readjustments  of  the  ice  of  the  brook  as  it  froze 
tighter  and  the  distressed  cries  of  the  birds  that 
had  roosted  in  the  fir. 

So  the  Tree  entered  the  house. 


THE  LIGHTING  OF  THE 
CANDLES 


Ill 

THE    LIGHTING    OF    THE    CANDLES 

URING  the  night  it  turned  bitter  cold. 
When  morning  came  the  sky  was 
a  turquoise  and  the  wind  a  gale. 
The  sun  seemed  to  give  out  light 
but  not  heat  —  to  lavish  its  splendor 
but  withhold  its  charity.  Moist  flesh  if  it  chanced 
to  touch  iron  froze  to  it  momentarily.  So  in  whiter 
land  the  tongue  of  the  ermine  freezes  to  the  piece 
of  greased  metal  used  as  a  trap  and  is  caught  and 
held  there  until  the  trapper  returns  or  until  it 
starves  —  starves  with  food  on  its  tongue. 

The  ground,  wherever  the  stiff  boots  of  a  farm 
hand  struck  it,  resisted  as  rock.  In  the  fetlocks 
of  farm  horses,  as  they  moved  shivering,  balls  of 
ice  rattled  like  shaken  tacks.  The  little  rough 
nesses  of  woodland  paths  snapped  off  beneath  the 
slow-searching  hoofs  of  fodder-seeking  cattle 
like  points  of  glass. 

Within  their  wool  the  sheep  were  comforted. 
69 


70  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

On  higher  fields  which  had  given  back  their 
moisture  to  the  atmosphere  and  now  were  dry, 
the  swooping  wind  lifted  the  dust  at  intervals  and 
dragged  it  away  in  flaunting  yellow  veils.  The 
picture  it  made,  being  so  ill-seasoned,  led  you  to 
think  of  August  drought  when  the  grasshopper 
stills  itself  in  the  weeds  and  the  smell  of  grass  is 
hot  in  the  nostrils  and  every  bird  holds  its  beak 
open  and  its  wings  lifted  like  cooling  lattices 
alongside  its  breast.  In  these  veils  of  dust  swarms 
of  frost  crystals  sported  —  dead  midgets  of  the 
dead  North.  Except  crystal  and  dust  and  wind, 
naught  moved  out  there ;  no  field  mouse,  no  hare 
nor  lark  nor  little  shielded  dove.  In  the  naked 
trees  of  the  pasture  the  crow  kept  his  beak  as 
unseen  as  the  owl's;  about  the  cedars  of  the  yard 
no  scarlet  feather  warmed  the  day. 

The  house  on  the  hill  —  one  of  the  houses 
whose  spirit  had  been  blown  into  the  amber  of 
the  poet's  song  —  sent  festal  smoke  out  of  its 
chimneys  all  day  long.  At  intervals  the  radiant 
faces  of  children  appeared  at  the  windows,  hang 
ing  wreaths  of  evergreens;  or  their  figures  flitted 
to  and  fro  within  as  they  wove  garlands  on  the 


The  Lighting  of  the  Candles  71 

wails  for  the  Christmas  party.  At  intervals  some 
servant  with  head  and  shoulders  muffled  in  a 
bright-colored  shawl  darted  trippingly  from  the 
house  to  the  cabins  in  the  yard  and  from  the 
cabins  back  to  the  house — the  tropical  African's 
polar  dance  between  fire  and  fire.  By  every  sign 
it  gave  the  house  showed  that  it  was  marshalling 
its  whole  happiness. 

One  thing  only  seemed  to  make  a  signal  of  dis 
tress  from  afar.  The  oak  tree  beside  the  house, 
whose  roots  coiled  warmly  under  the  hearth 
stones  and  whose  boughs  were  outstretched  across 
the  roof,  seemed  to  writhe  and  rock  in  its  winter 
sleep  with  murmurings  and  tossings  like  a  human 
dreamer  trying  to  get  rid  of  an  unhappy  dream. 
Imagination  might  have  said  that  some  darkest 
tragedy  of  forests  long  since  gone  still  lived  in  this 
lone  survivor  —  that  it  struggled  to  give  up  the 
grief  and  guilt  of  an  ancient  forest  shame. 

The  weather  moderated  in  the  afternoon.  A 
warm  current  swept  across  the  upper  atmosphere, 
developing  everywhere  behind  it  a  cloud;  and 
toward  sundown  out  of  this  cloud  down  upon  the 
Shield  snow  began  to  fall.  Not  the  large  wet 


72  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

flakes  which  sometimes  descend  too  late  in  spring 
upon  the  buds  of  apple  orchards;  nor  those 
mournfuller  ones  which  drop  too  soon  on  dim 
wild  violets  in  November  woods,  but  winter 
snow,  stern  sculptor  of  Arctic  solitudes. 

It  was  Christmas  Eve.  It  was  snowing  all 
over  the  Shield. 

Softly  the  snow  fell  upon  the  year's  footprints 
and  pathways  of  children  and  upon  schoolhouses 
now  closed  and  riotously  deserted.  More  softly 
upon  too  crowded  asylums  for  them:  houses  of 
noonday  darkness  where  eyes  eagerly  look  out 
at  the  windows  but  do  not  see;  houses  of  sound- 
lessness  where  ears  listen  and  do  not  hear  any 
noise;  houses  of  silence  where  lips  try  to  speak 
but  utter  no  word. 

The  snow  of  Christmas  Eve  was  falling  softly 
on  the  old :  whose  eyes  are  always  seeing  vanished 
faces,  whose  ears  hear  voices  gentler  than  any 
the  earth  now  knows,  whose  hands  forever  try 
to  reach  other  hands  vainly  held  out  to  them. 
Sad,  sad  to  those  who  remember  loved  ones  gone 
with  their  kindnesses  the  snow  of  Christmas  Eve ! 


The  Lighting  of  the  Candles  73 

But  sadder  yet  for  those  who  live  on  together 
after  kindnesses  have  ceased,  or  whose  love  went 
like  a  summer  wind.  Sad  is  Christmas  Eve  to 
them !  Dark  its  snow  and  blinding ! 

It  was  late  that  night. 

She  came  into  the  parlor,  clasping  the  bowl  of  a 
shaded  lamp  —  the  only  light  in  the  room.  Her 
face,  always  calm  in  life's  wisdom,  but  agitated 
now  by  the  tide  of  deep  things  coming  swiftly  in 
toward  her,  rested  clear-cut  upon  the  darkness. 

She  placed  the  lamp  on  a  table  near  the  door 
and  seated  herself  beside  it.  But  she  pushed  the 
lamp  away  unconsciously  as  though  the  light  of 
the  house  were  no  longer  her  light;  and  she  sat 
in  the  chair  as  though  it  were  no  longer  her  chair; 
and  she  looked  about  the  room  as  though  it  were 
no  longer  hers  nor  the  house  itself  nor  anything 
else  that  she  cared  for  most. 

Earlier  in  the  evening  they  had  finished  hanging 
the  presents  on  the  Tree;  but  then  an  interrup 
tion  had  followed:  the  children  had  broken  pro 
fanely  in  upon  them,  rending  the  veil  of  the  house 
mysteries;  and  for  more  than  an  hour  the  night 


74  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

had  been  given  up  to  them.  Now  the  children 
were  asleep  upstairs,  already  dreaming  of  Christ 
mas  Morn  and  the  rush  for  the  stockings.  The 
servants  had  finished  their  work  and  were  gone 
to  their  quarters  out  in  the  yard.  The  doors  of 
the  house  were  locked.  There  would  be  no  more 
intrusion  now,  no  possible  interruption;  all  the 
years  were  to  meet  him  and  her  —  alone.  For 
Life  is  the  master  dramatist:  when  its  hidden 
tragedies  are  ready  to  utter  themselves,  every 
thing  superfluous  quits  the  stage ;  it  is  the  essential 
two  who  fill  it!  And  how  little  the  rest  of  the 
world  ever  hears  of  what  takes  place  between  the 
two! 

A  little  while  before  he  had  left  the  room  with 
the  step-ladder;  when  he  came  back,  he  was  to 
bring  with  him  the  manuscript  —  the  silent  snow 
fall  of  knowledge  which  had  been  deepening  about 
him  for  a  year.  The  time  had  already  passed 
for  him  to  return,  but  he  did  not  come.  Was 
there  anything  in  the  forecast  of  the  night-  that 
made  him  falter  ?  Was  he  shrinking  —  him 
shrink?  She  put  away  the  thought  as  a  strange 
outbreak  of  injustice. 


The  Lighting  of  the  Candles  75 

How  still  it  was  outside  the  house  with  the  snow 
falling!  How  still  within!  She  began  to  hear 
the  ticking  of  the  tranquil  old  clock  under  the 
stairway  out  in  the  hall  —  always  tranquil,  always 
tranquil.  And  then  she  began  to  listen  to  the 
disordered  strokes  of  her  own  heart  —  that  red 
Clock  in  the  body's  Tower  whose  beats  are  sent 
outward  along  the  streets  and  alleys  of  the  blood ; 
whose  law  it  is  to  be  alternately  wound  too  fast 
by  the  ringers  of  Joy,  too  slow  by  the  fingers  of 
Sorrow;  and  whose  fate,  if  it  once  run  down, 
never  afterwards  either  by  Joy  or  Sorrow  to  be 
made  to  run  again. 

At  last  she  could  hear  the  distant  door  of  his 
study  open  and  close  and  his  steps  advance  along 
the  hall.  With  what  a  splendid  swing  and  tramp 
he  brought  himself  toward  her !  —  with  what  self- 
anconsciousness  and  virile  strength  in  his  feet ! 
His  steps  entered  and  crossed  his  bedroom, 
entered  and  crossed  her  bedroom;  and  then  he 
stood  there  before  her  in  the  parlor  doorway,  a 
few  yards  off  —  stopped  and  regarded  her  in 
tently,  smiling. 

In  a  moment  she  realized  what  had  delayed 


76  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

him.  When  he  had  gone  away  with  the  step- 
ladder,  he  had  on  a  well-worn  suit  in  which,  behind 
locked  doors,  he  had  been  working  all  the  after 
noon  at  the  decorations  of  the  Tree.  Now  he 
came  back  ceremoniously  dressed;  the  rest  of  the 
night  was  to  be  in  her  honor. 

It  had  always  been  so  on  this  anniversary  of 
their  bridal  night.  They  had  always  dressed  for 
it;  the  children  now  in  their  graves  had  been 
dressed  for  it ;  the  children  in  bed  upstairs  were 
regularly  dressed  for  it ;  the  house  was  dressed 
for  it ;  the  servants  were  dressed  for  it ;  the  whole 
life  of  that  establishment  had  always  been  made 
to  feel  by  honors  and  tendernesses  and  gayeties 
that  this  was  the  night  on  which  he  had  married 
her  and  brought  her  home. 

As  her  eyes  swept  over  him  she  noted  quite  as 
never  before  how  these  anniversaries  had  not 
taken  his  youth  away,  but  had  added  youth  to  him ; 
he  had  grown  like  the  evergreen  in  the  middle 
of  the  room  —  with  increase  of  trunk  and  limbs 
and  with  larger  tides  of  strength  surging  through 
him  toward  the  master  sun.  There  were  no  rav 
ages  of  married  life  in  him.  Time  had  merely 


The  Lighting  of  the  Candles  77 

made  the  tree  more  of  a  tree  and  made  his  youth 
more  youth. 

She  took  in  momentary  details  of  his  appearance : 
a  moisture  like  summer  heat  along  the  edge  of 
his  yellow  hair,  started  by  the  bath  into  which  he 
had  plunged;  the  freshness  of  the  enormous 
hands  holding  the  manuscript;  the  muscle  of  the 
forearm  bulging  within  the  dress-coat  sleeve. 
Many  a  time  she  had  wondered  how  so  perfect 
an  animal  as  he  had  ever  climbed  to  such  an 
elevation  of  work;  and  then  had  wondered  again 
whether  any  but  such  an  animal  ever  in  life  does  so 
climb  —  shouldering  along  with  him  the  poise  and 
breadth  of  health  and  causing  the  hot  sun  of  the 
valley  to  shine  on  the  mountain  tops. 

Finally  she  looked  to  see  whether  he,  thus  dressed 
in  her  honor,  thus  but  the  larger  youth  after  all 
their  years  together,  would  return  her  greeting 
with  a  light  in  his  eyes  that  had  always  made  them 
so  beautiful  to  her  —  a  light  burning  as  at  a 
portal  opening  inward  for  her  only. 

His  eyes  rested  on  his  manuscript. 

He  brought  it  wrapped  and  tied  in  the  true 
holiday  spirit  —  sprigs  of  cedar  and  holly  caught 


78  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

in  the  ribands ;  and  he  now  lifted  and  held  it  out 
to  her  as  a  jeweller  might  elevate  a  casket  of  gems. 
Then  he  stepped  forward  and  put  it  on  the  table 
at  her  elbow. 

"For  you!"  he  said  reverently,  stepping 
back. 

There  had  been  years  when,  returning  from  a 
tramp  across  the  country,  he  would  bring  her  per 
haps  nothing  but  a  marvellous  thistle,  or  a  brilliant 
autumn  leaf  for  her  throat. 

"For  you !"  he  would  say;  and  then,  before  he 
could  give  it  to  her,  he  would  throw  it  away  and 
take  her  in  his  arms.  Afterwards  she  would  pick 
up  the  trifle  and  treasure  it. 

"For  you!"  he  now  said,  offering  her  the 
treasure  of  his  year's  toil  and  stepping  back. 

So  the  weight  of  the  gift  fell  on  her  heart  like 
a  stone.  She  did  not  look  at  it  or  touch  it  but 
glanced  up  at  him.  He  raised  his  finger,  signal 
ling  for  silence ;  and  going  to  the  chimney  corner, 
brought  back  a  long  taper  and  held  it  over  the 
lamp  until  it  ignited.  Then  with  a  look  which 
invited  her  to  follow,  he  walked  to  the  Tree  and 
began  to  light  the  candles. 


The  Lighting  of  the  Candles  79 

He  began  at  the  lowest  boughs  and,  passing 
around,  touched  them  one  by  one.  Around  and 
around  he  went,  and  higher  and  higher  twinkled 
the  lights  as  they  mounted  the  tapering  sides  of 
the  fir.  At  the  top  he  kindled  one  highest  red 
star,  shining  down  on  everything  below.  Then 
he  blew  out  the  taper,  turned  out  the  lamp;  and 
returning  to  the  tree,  set  the  heavy  end  of  the  taper 
on  the  floor  and  grasped  it  midway,  as  one  might 
lightly  hold  a  stout  staff. 

The  room,  lighted  now  by  the  common  glow  of 
the  candles,  revealed  itself  to  be  the  parlor  of  the 
house  elaborately  decorated  for  the  winter  festival. 
Holly  wreaths  hung  in  the  windows;  the  walls 
were  garlanded;  evergreen  boughs  were  massed 
above  the  window  cornices;  on  the  white  lace  of 
window  curtains  many-colored  autumn  leaves, 
pressed  and  kept  for  this  night,  looked  as  though 
they  had  been  blown  there  scatteringly  by 
October  winds.  The  air  of  the  room  was  heavy 
with  odors ;  there  was  summer  warmth  in  it. 

In  the  middle  of  the  room  stood  the  fir  tree 
itself,  with  its  top  close  to  the  ceiling  and  its 
boughs  stretched  toward  the  four  walls  of  the 


80  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

room  impartially  —  as  symbolically  to  the  four 
corners  of  the  earth.  It  would  be  the  only 
witness  of  all  that  was  to  take  place  between  them : 
what  better  could  there  be  than  this  messenger 
of  silence  and  wild  secrecy  ?  From  the  mountains 
and  valleys  of  the  planet  its  race  had  looked  out 
upon  a  million  generations  of  men  and  women; 
and  the  calmness  of  its  lot  stretched  across  the 
turbulence  of  human  passion  as  an  ancient  bridge 
spans  a  modern  river. 

At  the  apex  of  the  Tree  a  star  shone.  Just 
beneath  at  the  first  forking  of  the  boughs  a  candle 
burned.  A  little  lower  down  a  cross  gleamed. 
Under  the  cross  a  white  dove  hung  poised,  its 
pinions  outstretched  as  though  descending  out  of 
the  infinite  upon  some  earthly  object  below. 
From  many  of  the  branches  tiny  bells  swung. 
There  were  little  horns  and  little  trumpets. 
Other  boughs  sagged  under  the  weight  of  silvery 
cornucopias.  Native  and  tropical  fruits  were  tied 
on  here  and  there;  and  dolls  were  tied  on  also 
with  cords  around  their  necks,  their  feet  dangling. 
There  were  smiling  masks,  like  men  beheaded 
and  smiling  in  their  death.  Near  the  base  of  the 


The  Lighting  of  the  Candles  81 

Tree  there  was  a  drum.  And  all  over  the  Tree 
from  pinnacle  to  base  glittered  a  tinsel  like  golden 
fleece  —  looking  as  the  moss  of  old  Southern  trees 
seen  at  yellow  sunset. 

He  stood  for  a  while  absorbed  in  contemplation 
of  it.  This  year  at  his  own  request  the  decorations 
had  been  left  wholly  .to  him;  now  he  seemed 
satisfied. 

He  turned  to  her  eagerly. 

"  Do  you  remember  what  took  place  on  Christ 
mas  Eve  last  year?"  he  asked,  with  a  reminiscent 
smile.  "You  sat  where  you  are  sitting  and  I 
stood  where  I  am  standing.  After  I  had  finished 
lighting  the  Tree,  do  you  remember  what  you 
said?" 

After  a  moment  she  stirred  and  passed  her 
fingers  across  her  brows. 

"  Recall  it  to  me,"  she  answered.  "  I  must  have 
said  many  things.  I  did  not  know  that  I  had  said 
anything  that  would  be  remembered  a  year. 
Recall  it  to  me." 

"You  looked  at  the  Tree  and  said  what  a 
mystery  it  is.  When  and  where  did  it  begin,  how 
and  why?  —  this  Tree  that  is  now  nourished  in 


82  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

the  affections  of  the  human  family  round  the 
world." 

"  Yes ;  I  remember  that." 

"  I  resolved  to  find  out  for  you.  I  determined 
to  prepare  during  what  hours  I  could  spare  from 
my  regular  college  work  the  gratification  of  your 
wish  for  you  as  a  gift  from  me.  If  I  could  myself 
find  the  way  back  through  the  labyrinth  of  ages, 
then  I  would  return  for  you  and  lead  you  back 
through  the  story  of  the  Christmas  Tree  as  that, 
story  has  never  been  seen  by  any  one  else.  All  this 
year's  work,  then,  has  been  the  threading  of  the 
labyrinth.  Now  Christmas  Eve  has  come  again, 
my  work  is  finished,  my  gift  to  you  is  ready." 

He  made  this  announcement  and  stopped,  leav 
ing  it  to  clear  the  air  of  mystery  —  the  mystery  of 
the  secret  work. 

Then  he  resumed:  "Have  you,  then,  been  the 
Incident  in  this  toil  as  yesterday  you  intimated 
that  you  were?  Do  you  now  see  that  you  have 
been  the  whole  reason  of  it  ?  You  were  excluded 
from  any  share  in  the  work  only  because  you 
could  not  help  to  prepare  your  own  gift !  That  is 
all.  What  has  looked  like  a  secret  in  this  house 


The  Lighting  of  the  Candles  83 

has  been  no  secret.  You  are  blinded  and  be 
wildered  no  longer;  the  hour  has  come  when 
holly  and  cedar  can  speak  for  themselves." 

Sunlight  broke  out  all  over  his  face. 

She  made  no  reply  but  said  within  herself : 

"Ah,  no!  That  is  not  the  trouble.  That  has 
nothing  to  do  with  the  trouble.  The  secret  of 
the  house  is  not  a  misunderstanding;  it  is  life.  It 
is  not  the  doing  of  a  year ;  it  is  the  undoing  of  the 
years.  It  is  not  a  gift  to  enrich  me  with  new  happi 
ness;  it  is  a  lesson  that  leaves  me  poorer." 

He  went  on  without  pausing : 

"It  is  already  late.  The  children  interrupted 
us  and  took  up  part  of  your  evening.  But  it  is 
not  too  late  for  me  to  present  to  you  some  little 
part  of  your  gift.  I  am  going  to  arrange  for  you  a 
short  story  out  of  the  long  one.  The  whole  long 
story  is  there,"  he  added,  directing  his  eyes  tow 
ard  the  manuscript  at  her  elbow;  and  his  voice 
showed  how  he  felt  a  scholar's  pride  in  it. 
"From  you  it  can  pass  out  to  the  world  that  cele 
brates  Christmas  and  that  often  perhaps  asks 
the  same  question:  What  is  the  history  of  the 
Christmas  Tree?  But  now  my  story  for  you !" 


84  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

"Wait  a  moment,"  she  said,  rising.  She  left 
the  package  where  it  was;  and  with  feet  that 
trembled  against  the  soft  carpet  crossed  the  room 
and  seated  herself  at  one  end  of  a  deep  sofa. 

Gathering  her  dignity  about  her,  she  took  there 
the  posture  of  a  listener  —  listening  at  her  ease. 

The  sofa  was  of  richly  carved  mahogany. 
Each  end  curved  into  a  scroll  like  a  landward 
wave  of  the  sea.  One  of  her  foam-white  arms 
rested  on  one  of  the  scrolls.  Her  elbow,  reaching 
beyond,  touched  a  small  table  on  which  stood  a 
vase  of  white  frosted  glass ;  over  the  rim  of  it  pro 
fuse  crimson  carnations  hung  their  heads.  They 
were  one  of  her  favorite  winter  flowers,  and  he 
had  had  these  sent  out  to  her  this  afternoon  from 
a  hothouse  of  the  distant  town  by  a  half-frozen 
messenger.  Near  her  head  curtains  of  crimson 
brocade  swept  down  the  wall  to  the  floor  from 
the  golden-lustred  window  cornices.  At  her  back 
were  cushions  of  crimson  silk.  At  the  other 
end  of  the  sofa  her  piano  stood  and  on  it  lay  the 
music  she  played  of  evenings  to  him,  or  played 
with  thoughts  of  him  when  she  was  alone.  And 
other  music  also  which  she  many  a  time  read: 
as  Beethoven's  Great  Nine. 


The  Lighting  of  the  Candles  85 

Now,  along  this  wall  of  the  parlor  from  window 
curtain  to  window  curtain  there  stretched  a 
festoon  of  evergreens  and  ribands  put  there  by  the 
children  for  their  Christmas-Night  party;  and 
into  this  festoon  they  had  fastened  bunches  of 
mistletoe,  plucked  from  the  walnut  tree  felled  the 
day  before  —  they  knowing  nothing,  happy  chil 
dren  ! 

There  she  reclined. 

The  lower  outlines  of  her  figure  were  lost  in  a 
rich  blackness  over  which  points  of  jet  flashed 
like  swarms  of  silvery  fireflies  in  some  too  warm 
a  night  of  the  warm  South.  The  blackness  of 
her  hair  and  the  blackness  of  her  brows  con 
trasted  with  the  whiteness  of  her  bare  arms  and 
shoulders  and  faultless  neck  and  faultless  throat 
bared  also.  Not  far  away  was  hid  the  warm 
foam-white  thigh,  curved  like  Venus's  of  old  out 
of  the  sea's  inaccessible  purity.  About  her 
wrists  garlands  of  old  family  corals  were  clasped 
—  the  ocean's  roses;  and  on  her  breast,  between 
the  night  of  her  gown  and  the  dawn  of  the  flesh, 
coral  buds  flowered  in  beauty  that  could  never  be 
opened,  never  be  rifled. 


86  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

When  she  had  crossed  the  room  to  the  sofa,  two 
aged  house-dogs  —  setters  with  gentle  eyes  and 
gentle  ears  and  gentle  breeding  —  had  followed 
her  and  lain  down  at  her  feet;  and  one  with  a 
thrust  of  his  nose  pushed  her  skirts  back  from 
the  toe  of  her  slipper  and  rested  his  chin  on  it. 

"I  will  listen,"  she  said,  shrinking  as  yet  from 
other  speech.  "I  wish  simply  to  listen.  There 
will  be  time  enough  afterwards  for  what  I  have 
to  say." 

"Then  I  shall  go  straight  through,"  he  replied. 
"  One  minute  now  while  I  put  together  the  story 
for  you :  it  is  hard  to  make  a  good  short  story  out 
of  so  vast  a  one." 

During  these  moments  of  waiting  she  saw  a  new 
picture  of  him.  Under  stress  of  suffering  and 
excitement  discoveries  denied  to  calmer  hours  often 
arrive.  It  is  as  though  consciousness  receives  a 
shock  that  causes  it  to  yawn  and  open  its  abysses : 
at  the  bottom  we  see  new  things:  sometimes 
creating  new  happiness ;  sometimes  old  happiness 
is  taken  away. 

As  he  stood  there  —  the  man  beside  the  Tree  — 
into  the  picture  entered  three  other  men,  looking 


The  Lighting  of  the  Candles  87 

down  upon  him  from  their  portraits  on  the 
walls. 

One  portrait  represented  the  first  man  of  his 
family  to  scale  the  mountains  of  the  Shield  where 
its  eastern  rim  is  turned  away  from  the  reddening 
daybreak.  Thence  he  had  forced  his  way  to  its 
central  portions  where  the  skin  of  ever  living 
verdure  is  drawn  over  the  rocks:  Anglo-Saxon, 
backwoodsman,  borderer,  great  forest  chief, 
hewing  and  fighting  a  path  toward  the  sunset  for 
Anglo-Saxon  women  and  children.  With  his 
passion  for  the  wilderness  —  its  game,  enemies, 
campfire  and  cabin,  deep-lunged  freedom.  This 
ancestor  had  a  lonely,  stern,  gaunt  face,  no 
modern  expression  in  it  whatsoever  —  the  time 
less  face  of  the  woods. 

Near  his  portrait  hung  that  of  a  second  repre 
sentative  of  the  family.  This  man  had  looked 
out  upon  his  vast  parklike  estates  in  the  central 
counties :  and  wherever  his  power  had  reached,  he 
had  used  it  on  a  great  scale  for  the  destruction  of 
his  forests.  Woods-slayer,  field-maker;  working 
to  bring  in  the  period  on  the  Shield  when  the  hand 
of  a  man  began  to  grasp  the  plough  instead  of  the 


88  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

rifle,  when  the  stallion  had  replaced  the  stag,  and 
bellowing  cattle  wound  fatly  down  into  the  pas 
tures  of  the  bison.  This  man  had  the  face  of 
his  caste  —  the  countenance  of  the  Southern  slave- 
holding  feudal  lord.  Not  the  American  face,  but 
the  Southern  face  of  a  definite  era  —  less  than 
national,  less  than  modern;  a  face  not  looking 
far  in  any  direction  but  at  things  close  around. 

From  a  third  portrait  the  latest  ancestor  looked 
down.  He  with  his  contemporaries  had  finished 
the  thinning  of  the  central  forest  of  the  Shield, 
leaving  the  land  as  it  is  to-day,  a  rolling  prairie 
with  remnants  of  woodland  like  that  crowning 
the  hilltop  near  this  house.  This  immediate 
forefather  bore  the  countenance  that  began  to 
develop  in  the  Northerner  and  in  the  Southerner 
after  the  Civil  War :  not  the  Northern  look  nor 
the  Southern  look,  but  the  American  look  —  a 
new  thing  in  the  American  face,  indefinable  but 
unmistakable. 

These  three  men  now  focussed  their  attention 
upon  him,  the  fourth  of  the  line,  standing  beside 
the  tree  brought  into  the  house.  Each  of  them  in 
his  own  way  had  wrought  out  a  work  for  civiliza- 


The  Lighting  of  the  Candles  89 

tion,  using  the  woods  as  an  implement.  In  his  own 
case,  the  woods  around  him  having  disappeared, 
the  ancestral  passion  had  made  him  a  student  of 
forestry. 

The  thesis  upon  which  he  took  his  degree  was 
the  relation  of  modern  forestry  to  modern  life.  A 
few  years  later  in  an  adjunct  professorship  his 
original  researches  in  this  field  began  to  attract 
attention.  These  had  to  do  with  the  South 
Appalachian  forest  in  its  relation  to  South  Appa 
lachian  civilization  and  thus  to  that  of  the 
continent. 

This  work  had  brought  its  reward ;  he  was  now 
to  be  drawn  away  from  his  own  college  and 
country  to  a  Northern  university. 

Curiously  in  him  there  had  gone  on  a  corre 
sponding  development  of  an  ancestral  face.  As 
the  look  of  the  wilderness  hunter  had  changed  into 
that  of  the  Southern  slave-holding  baron,  as  this 
had  changed  into  the  modern  American  face  un 
like  any  other;  now  finally  in  him  the  national 
American  look  had  broadened  into  something 
more  modern  still  —  the  look  of  mere  humanity : 
he  did  not  look  like  an  American  —  he  looked 
like  a  man  in  the  service  of  mankind. 


9O  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

This,  which  it  takes  thus  long  to  recapitulate, 
presented  itself  to  her  as  one  wide  vision  of  the 
truth.  It  left  a  realization  of  how  the  past  had 
swept  him  along  with  its  current ;  and  of  how  the 
future  now  caught  him  up  and  bore  him  on,  part 
in  its  problems.  The  old  passion  living  on  in 
him  —  forest  life ;  a  new  passion  born  in  him  — 
human  life.  And  by  inexorable  logic  these  two 
now  blending  themselves  to-night  in  a  story  of 
the  Christmas  Tree. 

But  womanlike  she  sought  to  pluck  out  of  these 
forces  something  intensely  personal  to  which  she 
could  cling ;  and  she  did  it  in  this  wise. 

In  the  Spring  following  their  marriage,  often 
after  supper  they  would  go  out  on  the  lawn  in  the 
twilight,  strolling  among  her  flowers;  she  leading 
him  this  way  and  that  way  and  laying  upon  him 
beautiful  exactions  and  tyrannies :  how  he  must  do 
this  and  do  that ;  and  not  do  this  and  not  do  that ; 
he  receiving  his  orders  like  a  grateful  slave. 

Then  sometimes  he  would  silently  imprison  her 
hand  and  lead  her  down  the  lawn  and  up  the 
opposite  hill  to  the  edge  of  the  early  summer 
evening  woods;  and  there  on  the  roots  of  some 


The  Lighting  of  the  Candles  91 

old  tree  —  the  shadows  of  the  forest  behind  them 
and  the  light  of  the  western  sky  in  their  faces  — 
they  would  stay  until  darkness  fell,  hiding  their 
eyes  from  each  other. 

The  burning  horizon  became  a  cathedral  in 
terior —  the  meeting  of  love's  holiness  and  the 
Most  High;  the  crescent  dropped  a  silver  veil 
upon  the  low  green  hills ;  wild  violets  were  at  their 
feet;  the  mosses  and  turf  of  the  Shield  under 
them.  The  warmth  of  his  body  was  as  the  day's 
sunlight  stored  in  the  trunk  of  the  tree;  his  hair 
was  to  her  like  its  tawny  bloom,  native  to  the  sun. 

Life  with  him  was  enchanted  madness. 

He  had  begun.  He  stretched  out  his  arm  and 
slowly  began  to  write  on  the  air  of  the  room. 
Sometimes  in  earlier  years  she  had  sat  in  his  class 
room  when  he  was  beginning  a  lecture;  and  it 
was  thus,  standing  at  the  blackboard,  that  he 
sometimes  put  down  the  subject  of  his  lecture  for 
the  students.  Slowly  now  he  shaped  each  letter 
and  as  he  finished  each  word,  he  read  it  aloud  to 
her: 

"  A    STORY   OF   THE   CHRISTMAS   TREE, 
FOR   JOSEPHINE,  WIFE   OF   FREDERICK  " 


THE   WANDERING   TALE 


IV 


THE   WANDERING  TALE 

'OSEPHINE!" 

He    uttered    her    name    with 
beautiful   reverence,   letting    the 
sound  01  it  float  over  the  Christ 
mas  Tree  and  die  away  on  the 
garlanded  walls  of  the  room :  it  was  his  last  trib 
ute  to  her,  a  dedication. 
Then  he  began: 

"  Josephine,  sometimes  while  looking  out  of  the 
study  window  a  spring  morning,  I  have  watched 
you  strolling  among  the  flowers  of  the  lawn.  I 
have  seen  you  linger  near  a  honeysuckle  in  full 
bloom  and  question  the  blossoms  in  your  question 
ing  way  —  you  who  are  always  wishing  to  probe 
the  heart  of  things,  to  drain  out  of  them  the  red 
drop  of  their  significance.  But,  gray-eyed  querist 
of  actuality,  those  fragrant  trumpets  could  blow 
to  your  ear  no  message  about  their  origin.  It 

95 


96  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

was  where  the  filaments  of  the  roots  drank  deep 
est  from  the  mould  of  a  dead  past  that  you  would 
have  had  to  seek  the  true  mouthpieces  of  their 
philosophy. 

"So  the  instincts  which  blossom  out  thickly 
over  the  nature  of  modern  man  to  themselves  are 
mute.  The  flower  exhibits  itself  at  the  tip  of  the 
vine;  the  instinct  develops  itself  at  the  farthest 
outreach  of  life;  and  the  point  where  it  clamors 
for  satisfaction  is  at  the  greatest  possible  dis 
tance  from  its  birthplace.  For  all  these  instincts 
send  their  roots  down  through  the  mould  of  the 
uncivilized,  down  through  the  mould  of  the  primi 
tive,  down  into  the  mould  of  the  underhuman  — 
that  ancient  playhouse  dedicated  to  low  tragedies. 

"While  this  may  seem  to  you  to  be  going  far 
for  a  commencement  of  the  story,  it  is  coming 
near  to  us.  The  kind  of  man  and  woman  we 
are  to  ourselves;  the  kind  of  husband  and  wife 
we  are  to  each  other;  the  kind  of  father  and 
mother  we  are  to  our  children ;  the  kind  of  human 
beings  we  are  to  our  fellow  beings  —  the  passions 
which  swell  as  with  sap  the  buds  of  those  relations 
until  they  burst  into  their  final  shapes  of  conduct 


The    Wandering  Tale  97 

are  fed  from  the  bottom  of  the  world's  mould. 
You  and  I  to-night  are  building  the  structures  of 
our  moral  characters  upon  life-piles  that  sink  into 
fathomless  ooze.  All  we  human  beings  dip  our 
drinking  cups  into  a  vast  delta  sweeping  majes 
tically  towards  the  sea  and  catch  drops  trickling 
from  the  springs  of  creation. 

"  It  is  in  a  vast  ancestral  country,  a  Fatherland 
of  Old  Desire,  that  my  story  lies  for  you  and  for 
me :  drawn  from  the  forest  and  from  human  nature 
as  the  two  have  worked  in  the  destiny  of  the 
earth.  I  have  wrested  it  from  this  Tree  come  out 
of  the  ancient  woods  into  the  house  on  this  Night 
of  the  Nativity." 

He  made  the  scholar's  pause  and  resumed, 
falling  into  the  tone  of  easy  narrative.  It  had 
already  become  evident  that  this  method  of  tell 
ing  the  story  would  be  to  find  what  Alpine  flowers 
he  could  for  her  amid  Alpine  snows. 

He  told  her  then  that  the  oldest  traceable  in 
fluence  in  the  life  of  the  human  race  is  the  sea. 
It  is  true  that  man  in  some  ancestral  form  was 
rocked  in  the  cradle  of  the  deep ;  he  rose  from  the 
waves  as  the  islanded  Greeks  said  of  near  Venus. 


98  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

Traces  of  this  origin  he  still  bears  both  in  his 
body  and  his  emotions;  and  together  they  make 
up  his  first  set  of  memories  —  Sea  Memories. 

He  deliberated  a  moment  and  then  put  the 
truth  before  her  in  a  single  picturesque  phrase : 

"  Man  himself  is  a  closed  living  sea-shell  in  the 
chambers  of  which  the  hues  of  the  first  ocean  are 
still  fresh  and  its  tempests  still  are  sounding." 

Next  he  told  her  how  man's  last  marine  ancestor 
quit  one  day  the  sea  never  again  to  return  to  the 
deep,  crossed  the  sands  of  the  beach  and  entered 
the  forest ;  and  how  upon  him,  this  living  sea-shell, 
soft  to  impressions,  the  Spirit  of  the  Forest  fell 
to  work,  beginning  to  shape  it  over  from  sea  uses 
to  forest  uses. 

A  thousand  thousand  ages  the  Spirit  of  the 
Forest  worked  at  the  sea-shell. 

It  remodelled  the  shell  as  so  much  clay ;  stood 
it  up  and  twisted  and  branched  it  as  young  pliant 
oak;  hammered  it  as  forge-glowing  iron;  tem 
pered  it  as  steel ;  cast  it  as  bronze ;  chiselled  it  as 
marble;  painted  it  as  a  cloud;  strung  and  tuned 
it  as  an  instrument;  lit  it  up  as  a  life  tower  — 
the  world's  one  beacon:  steadily  sending  it  on- 


The    Wandering  Tale  99 

ward  through  one  trial  form  after  another  until 
at  last  had  been  perfected  for  it  that  angelic 
shape  in  which  as  man  it  was  ever  afterwards  to 
sob  and  to  smile. 

And  thus  as  one  day  a  wandering  sea-shell 
had  quit  the  sea  and  entered  the  forest,  now  on 
another  day  of  that  infinite  time  there  reappeared 
at  the  edge  of  the  forest  the  creature  it  had  made. 
On  every  wall  of  its  being  internal  and  external 
forest-written;  and  completely  forest-minded: 
having  nothing  but  forest  knowledge,  forest 
feeling,  forest  dreams,  forest  fancies,  forest 
faith;  so  that  in  all  it  could  do  or  know  or 
feel  or  dream  or  imagine  or  believe  it  was  forest- 
tethered. 

At  the  edge  of  the  forest  then  this  creature  un 
controllably  impelled  to  emerge  from  the  waving 
green  sea  of  leaves  as  of  old  it  had  been  driven 
to  quit  the  rolling  blue  ocean  of  waters :  Man  at 
the  dawn  of  our  history  of  him. 

And  if  the  first  set  of  race  memories  —  Sea 
Memories  —  still  endure  within  him,  how  much 
more  powerful  are  the  second  set  —  the  Forest 
Memories ! 


IOO  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

So  powerful  that  since  the  dawn  of  history 
millions  have  perished  as  forest  creatures  only; 
so  powerful  that  there  are  still  remnant  races  on 
the  globe  which  have  never  yet  snapped  the 
primitive  tether  and  will  become  extinct  as  mere 
forest  creatures  to  the  last;  so  powerful  that 
those  highest  races  which  have  been  longest  out 
in  the  open  —  as  our  own  Aryan  race  —  have 
never  ceased  to  be  reached  by  the  influence  of 
the  woods  behind  them ;  by  the  shadows  of  those 
tall  morning  trees  falling  across  the  mortal  clear 
ings  toward  the  sunset. 

These  Master  Memories,  he  said,  filtering 
through  the  sandlike  generations  of  our  race,  sur 
vive  to-day  as  those  pale  attenuated  affections 
which  we  call  in  ourselves  the  Love  of  Nature; 
these  affections  are  inherited:  new  feelings  for 
nature  we  have  none.  The  writers  of  our  day 
who  speak  of  civilized  man's  love  of  nature  as  a 
developing  sense  err  wholly.  They  are  like  ex 
plorers  who  should  mistake  a  boundary  for  the 
interior  of  a  continent.  Man's  knowledge  of 
nature  is  modern,  but  it  no  more  endows  him  with 
new  feeling  than  modern  knowledge  of  anatomy 


The    Wandering  Tale\  ;  to  I; 

supplies  him  with  a  new  bone  or  his  latest  knowl 
edge  about  his  blood  furnishes  him  with  an  ad 
ditional  artery. 

Old  are  our  instincts  and  passions  about  Nature : 
all  are  Forest  Memories. 

But  among  the  many- twisted  mass  of  them 
there  is  one,  he  said,  that  contains  the  separate 
buried  root  of  the  story:  Man's  Forest  Faith. 

When  the  Spirit  of  the  Forest  had  finished  with 
the  sea-shell,  it  had  planted  in  him  —  there  to 
grow  forever  —  the  root  of  faith  that  he  was  a 
forest  child.  His  origin  in  the  sea  he  had  not  yet 
discovered;  the  science  of  ages  far  distant  in  the 
future  was  to  give  him  that.  To  himself  forest- 
tethered  he  was  also  forest-born:  he  believed 
it  to  be  his  immediate  ancestor,  the  creative  father 
of  mankind.  Thus  the  Greeks  in  their  oldest 
faith  were  tethered  to  the  idea  that  they  were 
descended  from  the  plane  tree ;  in  the  Sagas  and 
Eddas  the  human  race  is  tethered  to  the  world- 
ash.  Among  every  people  of  antiquity  this  forest 
faith  sprang  up  and  flourished:  every  race  was 
tethered  to  some  ancestral  tree.  In  the  Orient 
each  succeeding  Buddha  of  Indian  mythology 


102  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

was  tethered  to  a  different  tree;  each  god  of 
the  later  classical  Pantheon  was  similarly  teth 
ered:  Jupiter  to  the  oak,  Apollo  to  the  laurel, 
Bacchus  to  the  vine,  Minerva  to  the  olive,  Juno 
to  the  apple,  on  and  on.  Forest  worship  was 
universal  —  the  most  impressive  and  bewildering 
to  modern  science  that  the  human  spirit  has 
ever  built  up.  At  the  dawn  of  history  began  The 
Adoration  of  the  Trees. 

Then  as  man,  the  wanderer,  walked  away  from 
his  dawn  across  the  ages  toward  the  sunset  bear 
ing  within  him  this  root  of  faith,  it  grew  with  his 
growth.  The  successive  growths  were  cut  down 
by  the  successive  scythes  of  time;  but  always 
new  sprouts  were  put  forth. 

Thus  to  man  during  the  earliest  ages  the  divine 
dwelt  as  a  bodily  presence  within  the  forest;  but 
one  final  day  the  forest  lost  the  Immortal  as  its 
indwelling  creator. 

Next  the  old  forest  worshipper  peopled  the 
trees  with  an  intermediate  race  of  sylvan  deities 
less  than  divine,  more  than  human;  and  long  he 
beguiled  himself  with  the  exquisite  reign  and  prox 
imity  of  these ;  but  the  lesser  could  not  maintain 


The    Wandering  Tale  103 

themselves  in  temples  from  which  the  greater 
had  already  been  expelled,  and  they  too  passed 
out  of  sight  down  the  roadway  of  the  world. 

Still  the  old  forest  faith  would  not  let  the  wan 
derer  rest ;  and  during  yet  later  ages  he  sent  into 
the  trees  his  own  nature  so  that  the  woods  became 
freshly  endeared  to  him  by  many  a  story  of  how 
individuals  of  his  own  race  had  succeeded  as 
tenants  to  the  erstwhile  habitations  of  the  gods. 
Then  this  last  panorama  of  illusion  faded  also, 
and  civilized  man  stood  face  to  face  with  the 
modern  woods  —  inhabitated  only  by  its  sap 
and  cells.  The  trees  had  drawn  their  bark  close 
around  them,  wearing  an  inviolate  tapestry  across 
those  portals  through  which  so  many  a  stranger 
to  them  had  passed  in  and  passed  out ;  and  hence 
forth  the  dubious  oracle  of  the  forest  —  its  one 
reply  to  all  man's  questionings  —  became  the 
Voice  of  its  own  Mystery. 

After  this  the  forest  worshipper  could  worship 
the  woods  no  more.  But  we  must  not  forget  that 
civilization  as  compared  with  the  duration  of 
human  life  on  the  planet  began  but  yesterday: 
even  our  own  Indo-European  race  dwells  as  it 


IO4  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

were  on  the  forest  edge.  And  the  forest  still 
reaches  out  and  twines  itself  around  our  deepest 
spiritual  truths :  home — birth — love  —  prayer  — 
death:  it  tries  to  overrun  them  all,  to  reclaim 
them.  Thus  when  we  build  our  houses,  instinc 
tively  we  attempt  by  some  clump  of  trees  to  hide 
them  and  to  shelter  ourselves  once  more  inside 
the  forest;  in  some  countries  whenever  a  child 
is  born,  a  tree  is  planted  as  its  guardian  in  nature ; 
in  our  marriage  customs  the  forest  still  riots  as 
master  of  ceremonies  with  garlands  and  fruits; 
our  prayers  strike  against  the  forest  shaped  in 
cathedral  stone  —  memory  of  the  grove,  God's 
first  temple;  and  when  we  die,  it  is  the  tree  that 
is  planted  beside  us  as  the  sentinel  of  our  rest. 
Even  to  this  day  the  sight  of  a  treeless  grave  arouses 
some  obscure  instinct  in  us  that  it  is  God-forsaken. 
Yes,  he  said,  whatsoever  modern  temple  man 
has  anywhere  reared  for  his  spirit,  over  the  walls 
of  it  have  been  found  growing  the  same  leaf  and 
tendril:  he  has  introduced  the  tree  into  the 
ritual  of  every  later  world- worship ;  and  thus  he 
has  introduced  the  evergreen  into  the  ritual  of 
Christianity. 


The   Wandering  Tale  105 

This  then  is  the  meaning  of  the  Christmas 
Tree  and  of  its  presence  at  the  Nativity.  At  the 
dawn  of  history  we  behold  man  worshipping  the 
tree  as  the  Creator  literally  present  on  the  earth; 
in  our  time  we  see  him  using  that  tree  in  the 
worship  of  the  creative  Father's  Son  come  to 
earth  in  the  Father's  stead. 

"On  this  evergreen  in  the  room  falls  the 
radiance  of  these  brief  tapers  of  the  night;  but 
on  it  rests  also  the  long  light  of  that  spiritual 
dawn  when  man  began  his  Adoration  of  the  Trees. 
It  is  the  forest  taking  its  place  once  more  beside 
the  long-lost  Immortal." 

Here  he  finished  the  first  part  of  his  story.  That 
he  should  address  her  thus  and  that  she  thus  should 
listen  had  in  it  nothing  unusual  for  them.  For 
years  it  had  been  his  wont  to  traverse  with  her  the 
ground  of  his  lectures,  and  she  shared  his  thought 
before  it  reached  others.  It  was  their  high  and 
equal  comradeship.  Wherever  his  mind  could  go 
hers  went  —  a  brilliant  torch,  a  warming  sym 
pathy. 

But  to-night  his  words  had  fallen  on  her  as 
withered  leaves  on  a  motionless  figure  of  stone. 


io6  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

If  he  was  sensible  of  this  change  in  her,  he  gave 
no  sign.  And  after  a  moment  he  passed  to  the 
remaining  part  of  the  story. 

"Thus  far  I  have  been  speaking  to  you  of  the 
bare  tree  in  wild  nature:  here  it  is  loaded  with 
decorations ;  and  now  I  want  to  show  you  that  they 
too  are  Forest  Memories  —  that  since  the  ever 
green  moved  over  into  the  service  of  Christianity, 
one  by  one  like  a  flock  of  birds  these  Forest  Mem 
ories  have  followed  it  and  have  alighted  amid  its 
branches.  Everything  here  has  its  story.  I  am 
going  to  tell  you  in  each  case  what  that  story  is; 
I  am  going  to  interpret  everything  on  the  Christ 
mas  Tree  and  the  other  Christmas  decorations  in 
the  room." 

It  was  at  this  point  that  her  keen  attention 
became  fixed  on  him  and  never  afterwards 
wavered.  If  everything  had  its  story,  the  mistle 
toe  would  have  its ;  he  must  interpret  that :  and 
thus  he  himself  unexpectedly  had  brought  about 
the  situation  she  wished.  She  would  meet  him 
at  that  symbolic  bough:  there  be  rendered  the 
Judgment  of  the  Years !  And  now  as  one  sits 
down  at  some  point  of  a  road  where  a  traveller 
must  arrive,  she  waited  for  him  there. 


The   Wandering  Tale  107 

He  turned  to  the  Tree  and  explained  briefly 
that  as  soon  as  the  forest  worshipper  began  the 
worship  of  the  tree,  he  began  to  bring  to  it  his 
offerings  and  to  hang  these  on  the  boughs;  for 
religion  consists  in  offering  something:  to  wor 
ship  is  to  give.  In  after  ages  when  man  had 
learned  to  build  shrines  and  temples,  he  still 
kept  up  his  primitive  custom  of  bringing  to  the 
altar  his  gifts  and  sacrifices;  but  during  that  im 
measurable  time  before  he  had  learned  to  carve 
wood  or  to  set  one  stone  on  another,  he  was  bring 
ing  his  offerings  to  the  grove  —  the  only  cathedral 
he  had.  And  this  to  him  was  not  decoration; 
it  was  prayer.  So  that  in  our  age  of  the  world 
when  we  playfully  decorate  the  Christmas  Tree  it 
is  a  survival  of  grave  rites  in  the  worship  of  primi 
tive  man  and  is  as  ancient  as  forest  worship 
itself. 

And  now  he  began. 

With  the  pointer  in  his  hand  he  touched  the 
star  at  the  apex  of  the  fir.  This,  he  said,  was 
commonly  understood  to  represent  the  Star  of 
Bethlehem  which  guided  the  wise  men  of  the 
East  to  the  manger  on  the  Night  of  the  Nativity  — 


108  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

the  Star  of  the  New  Born.  But  modern  dis 
coveries  show  that  the  records  of  ancient  Chaldea 
go  back  four  or  five  thousand  years  before  the 
Christian  era;  and  as  far  back  as  they  have  been 
traced,  we  find  the  wise  men  of  the  East  worship 
ping  this  same  star  and  being  guided  by  it  in  their 
spiritual  wanderings  as  they  searched  for  the  in 
carnation  of  the  Divine.  They  worshipped  it  as 
the  star  of  peace  and  goodness  and  purity.  Many 
a  pious  Wolfram  in  those  dim  centuries  no  doubt 
sang  his  evening  hymn  to  the  same  star,  for  love 
of  some  Chaldean  Elizabeth  —  both  he  and  she 
blown  about  the  desert  how  many  centuries  now 
as  dust.  Moreover  on  these  records  the  star  and 
the  Tree  are  brought  together  as  here  side  by  side. 
And  the  story  of  the  star  leads  backward  to  one 
of  the  first  things  that  man  ever  worshipped  as 
he  looked  beyond  the  forest:  the  light  of  the 
heavens  floating  in  the  depth  of  space  —  light  that 
he  wanted  but  could  not  grasp. 

He  touched  the  next  object  on  the  Tree  —  the 
candle  under  the  star  —  and  went  on : 

Imagine,  he  said,  the  forest  worshipper  as  at 
the  end  of  ages  having  caught  this  light  —  having 


The    Wandering  Tale  109 

brought  it  down  in  the  language  of  his  myth  from 
heaven  to  earth:  that  is,  imagine  the  star  in 
space  as  having  become  a  star  in  his  hand  —  the 
candle :  the  star  worshipper  had  now  become  also 
the  fire  worshipper.  Thus  the  candle  leads  us  back 
to  the  fire  worshippers  of  ancient  Persia  —  those 
highlands  of  the  spirit  seeking  light.  We  think 
of  the  Christmas  candle  on  the  Tree  as  merely 
borrowed  from  the  candle  of  the  altar  for  the 
purpose  of  illumination;  but  the  use  of  it  goes 
back  to  a  time  when  the  forest  worshipper,  now 
also  the  fire  worshipper,  hung  his  lights  on  the 
trees,  having  no  other  altar.  Far  down  toward 
modern  times  the  temples  of  the  old  Prussians, 
for  example,  were  oak  groves,  and  among  them 
a  hierarchy  of  priests  was  ordained  to  keep  the 
sacred  fire  perpetually  burning  at  the  root  of  the 
sacred  oak. 

He  touched  the  third  object  on  the  tree  —  the 
cross  under  the  candle  —  and  went  on : 

"To  the  Christian  believer  the  cross  signifies 
one  supreme  event:  Calvary  and  the  tragedy  of 
the  Crucifixion.  It  was  what  the  Marys  saw  and 
the  apostles  that  morning  in  Gethsemane.  But 


no  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

no  one  in  that  age  thought  of  the  cross  as  a  Chris 
tian  symbol.  John  and  Peter  and  Paul  and  the 
rest  went  down  into  their  graves  without  so  regard 
ing  it.  The  Magdalene  never  clung  to  it  with 
life-tired  arms,  nor  poured  out  at  the  foot  of  it 
the  benizon  of  her  tears.  Not  until  the  third 
century  after  Christ  did  the  Bishops  assembled  at 
Nice  announce  it  a  Christian  symbol.  But  it  was 
a  sacred  emblem  in  the  dateless  antiquity  of 
Egypt.  To  primitive  man  it  stood  for  that  sacred 
light  and  fire  of  life  which  was  himself.  For  he 
himself  is  a  cross  —  the  first  cross  he  has  ever 
known.  The  faithful  may  truly  think  of  the  Son 
of  Man  as  crucified  as  the  image  of  humanity. 
And  thus  ages  before  Christ,  cross  worship  and 
forest  worship  were  brought  together:  for  in 
stance,  among  the  Druids  who  hunted  for  an 
oak,  two  boughs  of  which  made  with  the  trunk 
of  the  tree  the  figure  of  the  cross;  and  on  these 
three  they  cut  the  names  of  three  of  their  gods 
and  this  was  holy-cross  wood." 

He  moved  the  pointer  down  until  he  touched 
the  fourth  object  on  the  tree  —  the  dove  under  the 
cross,  and  went  on : 


The   Wandering  Tale  in 

"In  the  mind  of  the  Christian  believer  this  rep 
resents  the  white  dove  of  the  New  Testament 
which  descended  on  the  Son  of  Man  when  the 
heavens  were  opened.  So  in  Parsifal  the  white 
dove  descends,  overshadowing  the  Grail.  But 
ages  before  Christ  the  prolific  white  dove  of  Syria 
was  worshipped  throughout  the  Orient  as  the 
symbol  of  reproductive  Nature:  and  to  this  day 
the  Almighty  is  there  believed  to  manifest  himself 
under  this  form.  In  ancient  Mesopotamia  the 
divine  mother  of  nature  is  often  represented  with 
this  dove  as  having  actually  alighted  on  her 
shoulder  or  in  her  open  hand.  And  here  again 
forest  worship  early  became  associated  with  the 
worship  of  the  dove;  for,  sixteen  hundred  years 
before  Christ,  we  find  the  dove  nurtured  in  the 
oak  grove  at  Dodona  where  its  presence  was  an 
augury  and  its  wings  an  omen." 

On  he  went,  touching  one  thing  after  another, 
tracing  the  story  of  each  backward  till  it  was 
lost  in  antiquity  and  showing  how  each  was  en 
twined  with  forest  worship. 

He  touched  the  musical  instruments;  the  bell, 
the  drum.  The  bell,  he  said,  was  used  in  Greece 


H2  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

by  the  Priests  of  Bacchus  in  the  worship  of  the 
vine.  And  vine  worship  was  forest  worship. 
Moreover,  in  the  same  oak  grove  at  Dodona  bells 
were  tied  to  the  oak  boughs  and  their  tinklings 
also  were  sacred  auguries.  The  drum,  which 
the  modern  boy  beats  on  Christmas  Day,  was 
beaten  ages  before  Christ  in  the  worship  of 
Confucius :  the  story  of  it  dies  away  toward  what 
was  man's  first  written  music  in  forgotten  China. 
In  the  first  century  of  the  Christian  era,  on  one  of 
the  most  splendid  of  the  old  Buddhist  sculptures, 
boys  are  represented  as  beating  the  drum  in  the 
worship  of  the  sacred  tree  —  once  more  showing 
how  music  passed  into  the  service  of  forest  faith. 

He  touched  the  cornucopia;  and  he  traced  its 
story  back  to  the  ram's  horn  —  the  primitive  cup 
of  libation,  used  for  a  drinking  cup  and  used  also 
to  pour  out  the  last  product  of  the  vine  in  honor 
of  the  vine  itself  —  the  forest's  first  goblet. 

He  touched  the  fruits  and  the  flowers  on  the 
Tree:  these  were  oldest  of  all,  perhaps,  he  said; 
for  before  the  forest  worshipper  had  learned  to 
shape  or  fabricate  any  offerings  of  his  own  skill,  he 
could  at  least  bring  to  the  divine  tree  and  hang 


The    Wandering  Tale  113 

on  it  the  flower  of  spring,  the  wild  fruit  of 
autumn. 

He  kept  on  until  only  three  things  on  the  Tree 
were  left  uninterpreted ;  the  tinsel,  the  masks,  and 
the  dolls.  He  told  her  that  he  had  left  these  to  the 
last  for  a  reason:  seemingly  they  were  the  most 
trivial  but  really  the  most  grave;  for  by  means 
of  them  most  clearly  could  be  traced  the  pres 
ence  of  great  law  running  through  the  progress  of 
humanity. 

He  drew  her  attention  to  the  tinsel  that  covered 
the  tree,  draping  it  like  a  yellow  moss.  It  was  of 
no  value,  he  said,  but  in  the  course  of  ages  it  had 
taken  the  place  of  the  offering  of  actual  gold 
in  forest  worship:  a  once  universal  custom  of 
adorning  the  tree  with  everything  most  precious 
to  the  giver  in  token  of  his  sacrifice  and  self- 
sacrifice.  Even  in  Jeremiah  is  an  account  of  the 
lading  of  the  sacred  tree  with  gold  and  ornaments. 
Herodotus  relates  that  when  Xerxes  was  invading 
Lydia,  on  the  march  he  saw  a  divine  tree  and  had 
it  honored  with  golden  robes  and  gifts.  Livy 
narrates  that  when  Romulus  slew  his  enemy  on  the 
site  of  the  Eternal  City,  he  hung  rich  spoils  on  the 


114  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

oak  of  the  Capitoline  Hill.  And  this  custom  of 
decorating  the  tree  with  actual  gold  goes  back  in 
history  until  we  can  meet  it  coming  down  to  us  in 
the  story  of  Jason  and  the  Golden  Fleece  and 
in  that  of  the  Golden  Apples  of  the  Hesperides. 
Now  the  custom  has  dwindled  to  this  tinsel  flung 
over  the  Christmas  Tree  —  the  mock  sacrifice 
for  the  real. 

He  touched  the  masks  and  unfolded  the  grim 
story  that  lay  behind  their  mockery.  It  led  back 
to  the  common  custom  in  antiquity  of  sacrificing 
prisoners  of  war  or  condemned  criminals  or  inno 
cent  victims  in  forest  worship  and  of  hanging  their 
heads  on  the  branches:  we  know  this  to  have 
been  the  practice  among  Gallic  and  Teuton  tribes. 
In  the  course  of  time,  when  such  barbarity  could 
be  tolerated  no  longer,  the  mock  countenance 
replaced  the  real. 

He  touched  the  dolls  and  revealed  their  sad 
story.  Like  the  others,  its  long  path  led  to  an 
tiquity  and  to  the  custom  of  sacrificing  children 
in  forest  worship.  How  common  this  custom  was 
the  early  literature  of  the  human  race  too  abun 
dantly  testifies.  We  encounter  the  trace  of  it  in 


The   Wandering  Tale  1 1 5 

Abraham's  sacrifice  of  Isaac  —  arrested  by  the 
command  of  Jehovah.  But  Abraham  would  never 
have  thought  of  slaying  his  son  to  propitiate  his 
God,  had  not  the  custom  been  well  established. 
In  the  case  of  Jephthah's  daughter  the  sacrifice 
was  actually  allowed.  We  come  upon  the  same 
custom  in  the  fate  of  Iphigenia — at  a  critical 
turning  point  in  the  world's  mercy;  in  her  stead 
the  life  of  a  lesser  animal,  as  in  Isaac's  case,  was 
accepted.  When  the  protective  charity  of  man 
kind  turned  against  the  inhumanity  of  the  old 
faiths,  then  the  substitution  of  the  mock  for  the 
real  sacrifice  became  complete.  And  now  on  the 
boughs  of  the  Christmas  Tree  where  richly  we  come 
upon  vestiges  of  primitive  rites  only  these  playful 
toys  are  left  to  suggest  the  massacre  of  the  innocent. 

He  had  covered  the  ground;  everything  had 
yielded  its  story.  All  the  little  stories,  like  path 
ways  running  backward  into  the  distance  and 
ever  converging,  met  somewhere  in  lost  ages; 
they  met  in  forest  worship  and  they  met  in  some 
sacrifice  by  the  human  heart. 

And  thus  he  drew  his  conclusion  as  the  lesson 
of  the  night : 


Il6  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

"Thus,  Josephine,  my  story  ends  for  you  and 
for  me.  The  Christmas  Tree  is  all  that  is  left  of  a 
forest  memory.  The  forest  worshipper  could  not 
worship  without  giving,  because  to  worship  is  to 
give :  therefore  he  brought  his  gifts  to  the  forest  — 
his  first  altar.  These  gifts,  remember,  were  never, 
as  with  us,  decorations.  They  were  his  sacrifices 
and  self-sacrifices.  In  all  the  religions  he  has  had 
since,  the  same  law  lives.  In  his  lower  religions 
he  has  sacrificed  the  better  to  the  worse;  in  the 
higher  ones  he  has  sacrificed  the  worst  to  the 
best.  If  the  race  should  ever  outgrow  all  religion 
whatsoever,  it  would  still  have  to  worship  what  is 
highest  in  human  nature  and  so  worshipping,  it 
would  still  be  ruled  by  the  ancient  law  of  sacrifice 
become  the  law  of  self-sacrifice:  it  would  still  be 
necessary  to  offer  up  what  is  low  in  us  to  what  is 
higher.  Only  one  portion  of  mankind  has  ever 
believed  in  Jerusalem;  but  every  religion  has 
known  its  own  Calvary." 

He  turned  away  from  the  Tree  toward  her  and 
awaited  her  appreciation.  She  had  sat  watching 
him  without  a  movement  and  without  a  word. 
But  when  at  last  she  asked  him  a  question,  she 


The    Wandering  Tale  117 

spoke  as  a  listener  who  wakens  from  a  long 
revery. 

"Have  you  finished  the  story  for  me?"  she 
inquired. 

"I  have  finished  the  story  for  you,"  he  replied 
without  betraying  disappointment  at  her  icy  re 
ception  of  it. 

Keeping  her  posture,  she  raised  one  of  her  white 
arms  above  her  head,  turning  her  face  up  also 
until  the  swanlike  curve  of  the  white  throat 
showed ;  and  with  quivering  finger  tips  she  touched 
some  sprays  of  mistletoe  pendent  from  the  garland 
on  the  wall : 

"You  have  not  interpreted  this,"  she  said,  her 
mind  fixed  on  that  sole  omission. 

"I  have  not  explained  that,"  he  admitted. 

She  sat  up,  and  for  the  first  time  looked  with 
intense  interest  toward  the  manuscript  on  the 
table  across  the  room. 

"Have  you  explained  it  there?" 

"I  have  not  explained  it  there." 

"But  why?"  she  said  with  disappointment. 

"I  did  not  wish  you  to  read  that  story, 
Josephine." 


n8  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

"But  why,  Frederick?"  she  inquired,  startled 
into  wonderment. 

He  smiled :  "  If  I  told  you  why,  I  might  as  well 
tell  you  the  story." 

"But  why  do  you  not  wish  to  tell  me  the  story  ? " 

He  answered  with  warning  frankness :  "If  you 
once  saw  it  as  a  picture,  the  picture  would  be 
coming  back  to  you  at  times  the  rest  of  your  life 
darkly." 

She  protested :  "  If  it  is  dark  to  you,  why  should 
I  not  share  the  darkness  of  it?  Have  we  not 
always  looked  at  life's  shadows  together?  And 
thus  seeing  life,  have  not  bright  things  been 
doubly  bright  to  us  and  dark  things  but  half  as 
dark?" 

He  merely  repeated  his  warning:  "It  is  a  story 
of  a  crueler  age  than  ours.  It  goes  back  to  the 
forest  worship  of  the  Druids." 

She  answered:  "So  long  as  our  own  age  is 
cruel,  what  room  is  left  to  take  seriously  the  mere 
stories  of  crueler  ones  ?  Am  I  to  shrink  from  the 
forest  worship  of  the  Druids  ?  Is  there  any  story 
of  theirs  not  printed  in  books  ?  Are  not  the  books 
in  libraries?  Are  they  not  put  in  libraries  to  be 


The    Wandering  Tale  119 

read  ?  If  others  read  them,  may  not  I  ?  And  since 
when  must  I  begin  to  dread  anything  in  books? 
Or  anything  in  life?  And  since  when  did  we 
begin  to  look  at  life  apart,  we  who  have  always 
looked  at  it  with  four  eyes?" 

"I  have  always  told  you  there  are  things  to 
see  with  four  eyes,  things  to  see  with  two,  and 
things  to  see  with  none." 

With  sudden  intensity  her  white  arm  went  up 
again  and  touched  the  mistletoe. 

"Tell  me  the  story  of  this!"  she  pleaded  as 
though  she  demanded  a  right.  As  she  spoke, 
her  thumb  and  forefinger  meeting  on  a  spray, 
they  closed  and  went  through  it  like  a  pair  of 
shears;  and  a  bunch  of  the  white  pearls  of  the 
forest  dropped  on  the  ridge  of  her  shoulder  and 
were  broken  apart  and  rolled  across  her  breast 
into  her  lap. 

He  looked  grave ;  silence  or  speech  —  which 
were  better  for  her?  Either,  he  now  saw,  would 
give  her  pain. 

"Happily  the  story  is  far  away  from  us,"  he 
said,  as  though  he  were  half  inclined  to  grant  her 
request. 


120  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

"  If  it  is  far  away,  bring  it  near !  Bring  it  into 
the  room  as  you  brought  the  stories  of  the  star 
and  the  candle  and  the  cross  and  the  dove  and 
the  others  !  Make  it  live  before  my  eyes  !  Enact 
it  before  me !  Steep  me  in  it  as  you  have  steeped 
yourself!" 

He  held  back  a  long  time:  "You  who  are  so 
safe  in  good,  why  know  evil?" 

"Frederick,"  she  cried,  "I  shall  have  to  insist 
upon  your  telling  me  this  story.  And  if  you 
should  keep  any  part  of  it  back,  I  would  know. 
Then  tell  it  all :  if  it  is  dark,  let  each  shadow  have 
its  shade;  give  each  heavy  part  its  heaviness; 
let  cruelty  be  cruelty  —  and  truth  be  truth!" 

He  stood  gazing  across  the  centuries,  and  when 
he  began,  there  was  a  change  in  him;  something 
personal  was  beginning  to  intrude  itself  into  the 
narrative  of  the  historian: 

"Imagine  the  world  of  our  human  nature  in 
the  last  centuries  before  Palestine  became  Holy 
Land.  Athens  stood  with  her  marbles  glistening 
by  the  blue  ./Egean,  and  Greek  girls  with  fillets 
and  sandals  —  the  living  images  of  those  pale 
sculptured  shapes  that  are  the  mournful  eternity 


The    Wandering  Tale  121 

of  Art  —  Greek  girls  were  being  chosen  for  the 
secret  rites  in  the  temple  at  Ephesus.  The  sun 
of  Italy  had  not  yet  browned  the  little  children  who 
were  to  become  the  brown  fathers  and  mothers  of 
the  brown  soldiers  of  Caesar's  legions;  and 
twenty  miles  south  of  Rome,  in  the  sacred  grove 
of  Dodona,  —  where  the  motions  of  oak  boughs 
were  auguries,  and  the  flappings  of  the  wings  of 
white  doves  were  divine  messages,  and  the  tinkling 
of  bells  in  the  foliage  had  divine  meanings,  —  in 
this  grove  the  virgins  of  Latium,  as  the  Greek  girls 
of  Ephesus,  were  once  a  year  appointed  to  un 
dergo  similar  rites.  To  the  south  Pompeii,  with  its 
night  laughter  and  song  sounding  far  out  toward 
the  softly  lapping  Mediterranean  and  up  the  slopes 
of  its  dread  volcano,  drained  its  goblet  and  did 
not  care,  emptied  it  as  often  as  filled  and  asked 
for  nothing  more.  A  little  distance  off  Hercula- 
neum,  with  its  tender  dreams  of  Greece  but  with 
its  arms  around  the  breathing  image  of  Italy, 
slept  —  uncovered. 

"  Beyond  Italy  to  the  north,  on  the  other  side  of 
the  eternal  snowcaps,  lay  unknown  Gaul,  not  yet 
dreaming  of  the  Caesar  who  was  to  conquer  it; 


122  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

and  across  the  wild  sea  opposite  Gaul  lay  the 
wooded  isle  of  Britain.  All  over  that  island  one 
forest;  in  that  forest  one  worship;  in  that  wor 
ship  one  tree  —  the  oak  of  England ;  and  on  that 
oak  one  bough  —  the  mistletoe." 

He  spoke  to  her  awhile  about  the  oak,  de 
scribing  the  place  it  had  in  the  early  civilizations 
of  the  human  race.  In  the  Old  Testament  it 
was  the  tree  of  the  Hebrew  idols  and  of  Jehovah. 
In  Greece  it  was  the  tree  of  Zeus,  the  most  august 
and  the  most  human  of  the  gods.  In  Italy  it  was 
the  tree  of  Jove,  great  father  of  immortals  and  of 
mankind.  After  the  gods  passed,  it  became 
the  tree  of  the  imperial  Caesars.  After  the 
Caesars  had  passed,  it  was  the  oak  that  Michael 
Angelo  in  the  Middle  Ages  scattered  over  the 
ceiling  of  the  Sistine  Chapel  near  the  creation 
of  man  and  his  expulsion  from  Paradise  —  there 
as  always  the  chosen  tree  of  human  desire. 
In  Britain  it  was  the  sacred  tree  of  Druidism :  there 
the  Arch  Druid  and  his  fellow-priests  performed 
none  of  their  rites  without  using  its  leaves  and 
branches:  never  anywhere  in  the  world  was  the 
oak  worshipped  with  such  ceremonies  and  sacri 
fices  as  there. 


The   Wandering  Tale  123 

Imagine  then  a  scene  —  the  chief  Nature 
Festival  of  that  forest  worship:  the  New  Year's 
day  of  the  Druids. 

A  vast  concourse  of  people,  men  and  women 
and  children,  are  on  their  way  to  the  forest;  they 
are  moving  toward  an  oak  tree  that  has  been  found 
with  mistletoe  growing  on  it  —  growing  there  so 
seldom.  As  the  excited  throng  come  in  sight  of 
it,  they  hail  it  with  loud  cries  of  reverence  and 
delight.  Under  it  they  gather;  there  a  banquet 
is  spread.  In  the  midst  of  the  assemblage  one 
figure  towers  —  the  Arch  Druid.  Every  eye 
is  fixed  fearfully  on  him,  for  on  whomsoever  his 
own  eye  may  fall  with  wrath,  he  may  be  doomed 
to  become  one  of  the  victims  annually  sacrificed 
to  the  oak. 

A  gold  chain  is  around  his  neck;  gold  bands 
are  around  his  arms.  He  is  clad  in  robes  of  spot 
less  white.  He  ascends  the  tree  to  a  low  bough, 
and  making  a  hollow  in  the  folds  of  his  robes, 
he  crops  with  a  golden  pruning  hook  the  mistle 
toe  and  so  catches  it  as  it  falls.  Then  it  is  blessed 
and  scattered  among  the  throng,  and  the  priest 
prays  that  each  one  so  receiving  it  may  receive 


124  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

also  the  divine  favor  and  blessing  of  which  it  is 
Nature's  emblem.  Two  white  bulls,  the  horns  of 
which  have  never  hitherto  been  touched,  are  now 
adorned  with  fillets  and  are  slaughtered  in  sacrifice. 

Tt^en  at  last  it  is  over,  the  people  are  gone,  the 
forest  is  left  to  itself,  and  the  New  Year's  cere 
mony  of  cutting  the  mistletoe  from  the  oak  is  at 
an  end. 

Here  he  ended  the  story. 

She  had  sat  leaning  far  forward,  her  fingers 
interlocked  and  her  brows  knitted.  When  he 
stopped,  she  sat  up  and  studied  him  a  moment 
in  bewilderment: 

"But  why  did  you  call  that  a  dark  story?" 
she  asked.  "  Where  is  the  cruelty  ?  It  is  beauti 
ful,  and  I  shall  never  forget  it  and  it  will  never 
throw  a  dark  image  on  my  mind:  New  Year's 
day  —  the  winter  woods  —  the  journeying  throng 

—  the  oak  —  the  bough  —  the  banquet  beneath 

—  the  white  bulls  with  fillets  on  their  horns  — 
the    white-robed   priest  —  the   golden    sickle   in 
his  hand  —  the  stroke  that  severs  the   mistletoe 

—  the  prayer  that  each  soul  receiving  any  smallest 
piece  will  be  blessed  in  life's  sorrows  !     If  I  were 


The   Wandering  Tale  125 

a  great  painter,  I  should  like  to  paint  that  scene. 
In  the*  centre  should  be  some  young  girl,  pressing 
to  her  heart  what  she  believed  to  be  heaven's 
covenant  with  her  under  the  guise  of  a  blossom. 
How  could  you  have  wished  to  withhold  such  a 
story  from  me?" 

He  smiled  at  her  a  little  sadly. 

"I  have  not  yet  told  you  all,"  he  said,  "but  I 
have  told  you  enough." 

Instantly  she  bent  far  over  toward  him  with 
intuitive  scrutiny.  Under  her  breath  one  word 
escaped : 

"Ah!" 

It  was  the  breath  of  a  discovery  —  a  discovery 
of  something  unknown  to  her. 

"I  am  sparing  you,  Josephine!" 

She  stretched  each  arm  along  the  back  of  the 
sofa  and  pinioned  the  wood  in  her  clutch. 

"Are  you  sparing  me?"  she  asked  in  a  tone 
of  torture.  "Or  are  you  sparing  yourself?" 

The  heavy  staff  on  which  he  stood  leaning 
dropped  from  his  relaxed  grasp  to  the  floor. 
He  looked  down  at  it  a  moment  and  then  calmly 
picked  it  up. 


126  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

"I  am  going  to  tell  you  the  story,"  he  said  with 
a  new  quietness. 

She  was  aroused  by  some  change  in  him. 

"  I  will  not  listen  !     I  do  not  wish  to  hear  it !" 

"You  will  have  to  listen,"  he  said.  "It  is 
better  for  you  to  know.  Better  for  any  human 
being  to  know  any  truth  than  suffer  the  bane  of 
wrong  thinking.  When  you  are  free  to  judge,  it 
will  be  impossible  for  you  to  misjudge." 

"  I  have  not  misjudged  you !  I  have  not  judged 
you !  In  some  way  that  I  do  not  understand  you 
are  judging  yourself!" 

He  stepped  back  a  pace  —  farther  away  from 
her  —  and  he  drew  himself  up.  In  the  movement 
there  was  instinctive  resentment.  And  the  right 
not  to  be  pried  into  —  not  even  by  the  nearest. 

The  step  which  had  removed  him  farther  from 
her  had  brought  him  nearer  to  the  Christmas 
Tree  at  his  back.  A  long,  three-fingered  bough 
being  thus  pressed  against  was  forced  upward 
and  reappeared  on  one  of  his  shoulders.  The 
movement  seemed  human:  it  was  like  the  con 
scious  hand  of  the  tree.  The  fir,  standing  there 
decked  out  in  the  artificial  tawdriness  of  a  double- 


The   Wandering  Tale  127 

dealing  race,  laid  its  wild  sincere  touch  on  him  — 
as  sincere  as  the  touch  of  dying  human  fingers  — 
and  let  its  passing  youth  flow  into  him.  It 
attracted  his  attention,  and  he  turned  his  head 
toward  it  as  with  recognition.  Other  boughs 
near  the  floor  likewise  thrust  themselves  forward, 
hiding  his  feet  so  that  he  stood  ankle-deep  in 
forestry. 

This  reunion  did  not  escape  her.  Her  over 
wrought  imagination  made  of  it  a  sinister  omen : 
the  bough  on  his  shoulder  rested  there  as  the  old 
forest  claim;  the  boughs  about  his  feet  were  the 
ancestral  forest  tether.  As  he  had  stepped  back 
ward  from  her,  Nature  had  asserted  the  earlier 
right  to  him.  In  strange  sickness  and  desolation 
of  heart  she  waited. 

He  stood  facing  her  but  looking  past  her  at 
centuries  long  gone;  the  first  sound  of  his  voice 
registered  upon  her  ear  some  message  of  doom: 

' '  Listen,  Josephine ! ' ' 

She  buried  her  face  in  her  hands. 

"I  cannot!    I  will  not!" 

"You  will  have  to  listen.  You  know  that  for 
some  years,  apart  from  my  other  work,  I  have  been 


128  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

gathering  together  the  woodland  customs  of  our 
people  and  trying  to  trace  them  back  to  their 
origin  and  first  meaning.  In  our  age  of  the 
world  we  come  upon  many  playful  forest  survi 
vals  of  what  were  once  grave  things.  Often  in 
our  play  and  pastimes  and  lingering  superstitions 
about  the  forest  we  cross  faint  traces  of  what  were 
once  vital  realities. 

"Among  these  there  has  always  been  one  that 
until  recently  I  have  never  understood.  Among 
country  people  oftenest,  but  heard  of  everywhere, 
is  the  saying  that  if  a  girl  is  caught  standing  under 
the  mistletoe,  she  may  be  kissed  by  the  man  who 
thus  finds  her.  I  have  always  thought  that  this 
ceremony  and  playful  sacrifice  led  back  to  some 
ancient  rite  —  I  could  not  discover  what.  Now 
I  know." 

In  a  voice  full  of  a  new  delicacy  and  scarcely 
audible,  he  told  her. 

It  is  another  scene  in  the  forest  of  Britain. 
This  time  it  is  not  the  first  day  of  the  year  — 
the  New  Year's  day  of  the  Druids  when  they 
celebrated  the  national  festival  of  the  oak.  But 


The    Wandering  Tale  129 

it  is  early  summer,  perhaps  the  middle  of  May  — 
May  in  England  —  with  the  young  beauty  of 
the  woods.  It  is  some  hushed  evening  at  twilight. 
The  new  moon  is  just  silvering  the  tender  leaves 
and  creating  a  faint  shadow  under  the  trees. 
The  hawthorn  is  in  bloom  —  red  and  white  — 
and  not  far  from  the  spot,  hidden  in  some  fra 
grant  tuft  of  this,  a  nightingale  is  singing,  singing, 
singing. 

Lifting  itself  above  the  smaller  growths  stands 
the  young  manhood  of  the  woods — a  splendid  oak 
past  its  thirtieth  year,  representing  its  youth  and 
its  prime  conjoined.  In  its  trunk  is  the  summer 
heat  of  the  all-day  sun.  Around  its  roots  is  velvet 
turf,  and  there  are  wild  violet  beds.  Its  huge  arms 
are  stretched  toward  the  ground  as  though  reach 
ing  for  some  object  they  would  clasp ;  and  on  one 
of  these  arms  as  its  badge  of  divine  authority, 
worn  there  as  a  knight  might  wear  the  colors  of  his 
Sovereign,  grows  the  mistletoe.  There  he  stands 
—  the  Forest  Lover. 

The  woods  wait,  the  shadows  deepen,  the  hush 
is  more  intense,  the  moon's  rays  begin  to  be 


130  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

golden,  the  song  of  the  nightingale  grows  more 
passionate,  the  beds  of  moss  and  violets  wait. 

Then  the  shrubbery  is  tremblingly  parted  at 
some  place  and  upon  the  scene  a  young  girl  enters 
—  her  hair  hanging  down — her  limbs  most  lightly 
clad  —  the  flush  of  red  hawthorn  on  the  white 
hawthorn  of  her  skin  —  in  her  eyes  love's  great 
need  and  mystery.  Step  by  step  she  comes 
forward,  her  ringers  trailing  against  whatsoever 
budding  wayside  thing  may  stay  her  strength. 
She  draws  nearer  to  the  oak,  searching  amid  its 
boughs  for  that  emblem  which  she  so  dreads  to 
find  and  yet  more  dreads  not  to  find :  the  emblem 
of  a  woman's  fruitfulness  which  the  young  oak  — 
the  Forest  Lover  —  reaches  down  toward  her. 
Finding  it,  beneath  it  with  one  deep  breath  of 
surrender  she  takes  her  place — the  virgin's  tryst 
with  the  tree  —  there  to  be  tested. 

Such  is  the  command  of  the  Arch  Druid :  it  is 
obedience  —  submission  to  that  test  —  or  death 
for  her  as  a  sacrifice  to  the  oak  which  she  has 
rejected. 

Again  the  shrubbery  is  parted,  rudely  pushed 
aside,  and  a  man  enters  —  a  tried  and  seasoned 


The    Wandering  Tale  131 

man  —  a  human  oak  —  counterpart  of  the  Forest 
Lover  —  to  officiate  at  the  test. 

He  was  standing  there  in  the  parlor  of  his 
house  and  in  the  presence  of  his  wife.  But  in 
fealty  he  was  gone :  he  was  in  the  summer  woods 
of  ancestral  wandering,  the  fatherland  of  Old 
Desire. 

He  was  the  man  treading  down  the  shrubbery; 
it  was  his  feet  that  started  toward  the  oak;  his 
eye  that  searched  for  the  figure  half  fainting  under 
the  bough ;  for  him  the  bed  of  moss  and  violets  — 
the  hair  falling  over  the  eyes — the  loosened  girdle 
—  the  breasts  of  hawthorn  white  and  pink  — 
the  listening  song  of  the  nightingale  —  the  silence 
of  the  summer  woods  —  the  seclusion  —  the  full 
surrender  of  the  two  under  that  bough  of  the 
divine  command,  to  escape  the  penalty  of  their 
own  death. 

The  blaze  of  uncontrollable  desire  was  all  over 
him;  the  fire  of  his  own  story  had  treacherously 
licked  him  like  a  wind-bent  flame.  The  light 
that  she  had  not  seen  in  his  eyes  for  so  long 
rose  in  them  —  the  old,  unfathomable,  infolding 


132  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

tenderness.  A  quiver  ran  around  his  tense 
nostrils. 

And  now  one  little  phrase  which  he  had  uttered 
so  sacredly  years  before  and  had  long  since  for 
gotten  rose  a  second  time  to  his  lips  —  tossed  there 
by  a  second  tide  of  feeling.  On  the  silence  of  the 
room  fell  his  words : 

"Bride  of  the  Mistletoe!  " 

The  storm  that  had  broken  over  him  died  away. 
He  shut  his  eyes  on  the  vanishing  scene :  he  opened 
them  upon  her. 

He  had  told  her  the  truth  about  the  story;  he 
may  have  been  aware  or  he  may  not  have  been 
aware  that  he  had  revealed  to  her  the  truth  about 
himself. 

u  This  is  what  I  would  have  kept  from  you,  Jose 
phine,"  he  said  quietly. 

She  was  sitting  there  before  him  —  the  mother 
of  his  children,  of  the  sleeping  ones,  of  the  buried 
ones  —  the  butterfly  broken  on  the  wheel  of 
years :  lustreless  and  useless  now  in  its  summer. 

She  sat  there  with  the  whiteness  of  death. 


THE    ROOM   OF   THE    SILENCES 


THE  ROOM  OF  THE  SILENCES 


HE  Christmas  candles  looked  at  her 
flickeringly ;  the  little  white  can 
dles  of  purity,  the  little  red  candles 
of  love.  The  holly  in  the  room 
concealed  its  bold  gay  berries  be 
hind  its  thorns,  and  the  cedar  from  the  faithful 
tree  beside  the  house  wall  had  need  now  of  its 
bitter  rosary. 

Her  first  act  was  to  pay  what  is  the  first  debt 
of  a  fine  spirit  —  the  debt  of  courtesy  and  gratitude. 
"It  is  a  wonderful  story,  Frederick,"  she  said 
in  a  manner  which  showed  him  that  she  referred 
to  the  beginning  of  his  story  and  not  to  the  end. 
"As  usual  you  have  gone  your  own  way  about  it, 
opening  your  own  path  into  the  unknown,  seeing 
what  no  one  else  has  seen,  and  bringing  back  what 
no  one  else  ever  brought.  It  is  a  great  revelation 
of  things  that  I  never  dreamed  of  and  could  never 
have  imagined.  I  appreciate  your  having  done 
135 


136  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

this  for  me;  it  has  taken  time  and  work,  but  it  is 
too  much  for  me  to-night.  It  is  too  new  and  too 
vast.  I  must  hereafter  try  to  understand  it.  And 
there  will  be  leisure  enough.  Nor  can  it  lose  by 
waiting.  But  now  there  is  something  that  can 
not  wait,  and  I  wish  to  speak  to  you  about  that; 
Frederick,  I  am  going  to  ask  you  some  questions 
about  the  last  part  of  the  story.  I  have  been 
wanting  to  ask  you  a  long  time:  the  story  gives 
me  the  chance  and  —  the  right." 

He  advanced  a  step  toward  her,  disengaging 
himself  from  the  evergreen. 

"  I  will  answer  them,"  he  said.  "  If  they  can  be 
answered." 

And  thus  she  sat  and  thus  he  stood  as  the 
questions  and  answers  passed  to  and  fro.  They 
were  solemn  questions  and  solemn  replies,  drawn 
out  of  the  deeps  of  life  and  sinking  back  into 
them. 

"Frederick,"  she  said,  "for  many  years  we 
have  been  happy  together,  so  happy !  Every 
tragedy  of  nature  has  stood  at  a  distance  from  us 
except  the  loss  of  our  children.  We  have  lived 
on  a  sunny  pinnacle  of  our  years,  lifted  above 


The  Room  of  the  Silences  137 

life's  storms.  But  of  course  I  have  realized  that 
sooner  or  later  our  lot  must  become  the  common 
one :  if  we  did  not  go  down  to  Sorrow,  Sorrow 
would  climb  to  us ;  and  I  knew  that  on  the  heights 
it  dwells  best.  That  is  why  I  wish  to  say  to  you 
to-night  what  I  shall:  I  think  fate's  hour  has 
struck  for  me;  I  am  ready  to  hear  it.  Its  arrow 
has  already  left  the  bow  and  is  on  its  way;  I 
open  my  heart  to  receive  it.  This  is  as  I  have 
always  wished;  I  have  said  that  if  life  had  any 
greatest  tragedy  for  me,  I  hoped  it  would  come 
when  I  was  happiest;  thus  I  should  confront  it 
all.  I  have  never  drunk  half  of  my  cup  of  happi 
ness,  as  you  know,  and  let  the  other  half  waste; 
I  must  go  equally  to  the  depth  of  any  suffering. 
Worse  than  the  suffering,  I  think,  would  be  the 
feeling  that  I  had  shirked  some  of  it,  had  stepped 
aside,  or  shut  my  eyes,  or  in  any  manner  shown 
myself  a  cowardly  soul." 

After  a  pause  she  went  over  this  subject  as 
though  she  were  not  satisfied  that  she  had  made 
it  clear. 

"I  have  always  said  that  the  real  pathos  of 
things  is  the  grief  that  comes  to  us  in  life  when 


138  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

life  is  at  its  best  —  when  no  one  is  to  blame — 
when  no  one  has  committed  a  fault  —  when  suffer 
ing  is  meted  out  to  us  as  the  reward  of  our  perfect 
obedience  to  the  laws  of  nature.  In  earlier  years 
when  we  used  to  read  Keats  together,  who  most 
of  all  of  the  world's  poets  felt  the  things  that  pass, 
even  then  I  was  wondering  at  the  way  in  which 
he  brings  this  out:  that  to  understand  Sorrow 
it  must  be  separated  from  sorrows :  they  would 
be  like  shadows  darkening  the  bright  disk  of 
life's  clear  tragedy,  thus  rendering  it  less  bravely 
seen. 

"  And  so  he  is  always  telling  us  not  to  summon 
sad  pictures  nor  play  with  mournful  emblems; 
not  to  feign  ourselves  as  standing  on  the  banks 
of  Lethe,  gloomiest  of  rivers;  nor  to  gather  wolf's 
bane  and  twist  the  poison  out  of  its  tight  roots; 
nor  set  before  us  the  cup  of  hemlock ;  nor  bind 
about  our  temples  the  ruby  grape  of  nightshade; 
nor  count  over  the  berries  of  the  yew  tree  which 
guards  sad  places ;  nor  think  of  the  beetle  ticking 
in  the  bed  post,  nor  watch  the  wings  of  the  death 
moth,  nor  listen  to  the  elegy  of  the  owl  —  the 
voice  of  ruins.  Not  these !  they  are  the  emblems 


The  Room  of  the  Silences  139 

of  our  sorrows.  But  the  emblems  of  Sorrow  are 
beautiful  things  at  their  perfect  moment;  a  red 
peony  just  opening,  a  rainbow  seen  for  an  instant 
on  the  white  foam,  youth  not  yet  faded  but  already 
fading,  joy  with  its  finger  on  his  lips,  bidding 
adieu. 

"And  so  with  all  my  happiness  about  me,  I 
wish  to  know  life's  tragedy.  And  to  know  it, 
Frederick,  not  to  infer  it  :  /  want  to  be  told" 

"If  you  can  be  told,  you  shall  be  told,"  he  said. 

She  changed  her  position  as  though  seeking 
physical  relief  and  composure.  Then  she  began: 

"Years  ago  when  you  were  a  student  in  Ger 
many,  you  had  a  college  friend.  You  went  home 
with  him  two  or  three  years  at  Christmas  and 
celebrated  the  German  Christmas.  It  was  in  this 
way  that  we  came  to  have  the  Christmas  Tree  in 
our  house  —  through  memory  of  him  and  of  those 
years.  You  have  often  described  to  me  how  you 
and  he  in  summer  went  Alpine  climbing,  and  far 
up  in  some  green  valley  girdled  with  glaciers  lay  of 
afternoons  under  some  fir  tree,  reading  and  drows 
ing  in  the  crystalline  air.  You  told  me  of  your 
nights  of  wandering  down  the  Rhine  together  when 


140  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

the  heart  turns  so  intimately  to  the  heart  beside 
it.  He  was  German  youth  and  song  and  dream 
and  happiness  to  you.  Tell  me  this :  before  you 
lost  him  that  last  summer  over  the  crevasse,  had 
you  begun  to  tire  of  him?  Was  there  anything 
in  you  that  began  to  draw  back  from  anything  in 
him?  As  you  now  look  back  at  the  friendship 
of  your  youth,  have  the  years  lessened  your 
regret  for  him?" 

He  answered  out  of  the  ideals  of  his  youth : 

"The  longer  I  knew  him,  the  more  I  loved  him. 
I  never  tired  of  being  with  him.  Nothing  in  me 
ever  drew  back  from  anything  in  him.  When  he 
was  lost,  the  whole  world  lost  some  of  its  strength 
and  nobility.  After  all  the  years,  if  he  could 
come  back,  he  would  find  me  unchanged  —  that 
friend  of  my  youth  ! " 

With  a  peculiar  change  of  voice  she  asked 
next: 

"The  doctor,  Herbert  and  Elsie's  father,  our 
nearest  neighbor,  your  closest  friend  now  in 
middle  life.  You  see  a  great  deal  of  the  doctor ;  he 
is  often  here,  and  you  and  he  often  sit  up  late  at 
night,  talking  with  one  another  about  many  things : 


The  Room  of  the  Silences  141 

do  you  ever  tire  of  the  doctor  and  wish  him  away  ? 
Have  you  any  feeling  toward  him  that  you  try  to 
keep  secret  from  me?  Can  you  be  a  perfectly 
frank  man  with  this  friend  of  your  middle  life  ?  " 

"The  longer  I  know  him  the  more  I  like  him, 
honor  him,  trust  him.  I  never  tire  of  his  com 
panionship  or  his  conversation;  I  have  no  dis 
guises  with  him  and  need  none." 

"The  children  !  As  the  children  grow  older  do 
you  care  less  for  them  ?  Do  they  begin  to  wear 
on  you?  Are  they  a  clog,  an  interference? 
Have  Harold  and  Elizabeth  ceased  forming  new 
growths  of  affection  in  you?  Do  you  ever  un 
consciously  seek  pretexts  for  avoiding  them?" 

"The  older  they  grow,  the  more  I  love  them. 
The  more  they  interest  me  and  tempt  away  from 
work  and  duties.  I  am  more  drawn  to  be  with 
them  and  I  live  more  and  more  in  the  thought  of 
what  they  are  becoming." 

"Your  work !  Does  your  work  attract  you  less 
than  formerly?  Does  it  develop  in  you  the  pur 
pose  to  be  something  more  or  stifle  in  you  the 
regret  to  be  something  less?  Is  it  a  snare  to 
idleness  or  a  goad  to  toil?" 


142  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

"  As  the  mariner  steers  for  the  lighthouse,  as  the 
hound  runs  down  the  stag,  as  the  soldier  wakes  to 
the  bugle,  as  the  miner  digs  for  fortune,  as  the 
drunkard  drains  the  cup,  as  the  saint  watches  the 
cross,  I  follow  my  work,  I  follow  my  work." 

"Life,  life  itself,  does  it  increase  in  value  or 
lessen?  Is  the  world  still  morning  to  you  with 
your  work  ahead  or  afternoon  when  you  begin  to 
tire  and  to  think  of  rest?" 

"The  world  to  me  is  as  early  morning  to  a  man 
going  forth  to  his  work.  Where  the  human  race  is 
from  and  whither  it  is  hurrying  and  why  it  exists 
at  all;  why  a  human  being  loves  what  it  loves 
and  hates  what  it  hates;  why  it  is  faithful  when 
it  could  be  unfaithful  and  faithless  when  it  should 
be  true;  how  civilized  man  can  fight  single 
handed  against  the  ages  that  were  his  lower  past 
—  how  he  can  develop  self-renunciation  out  of 
selfishness  and  his  own  wisdom  out  of  surround 
ing  folly,  —  all  these  are  questions  that  mean 
more  and  more.  My  work  is  but  beginning  and 
the  world  is  morning." 

"This  house !  Are  you  tired  of  it  now  that  it  is 
older  ?  Would  you  rather  move  into  a  new  one  ?  " 


The  Room  of  the  Silences  143 

"I  love  this  house  more  and  more.  No  other 
dwelling  could  take  its  place.  Any  other  could  be 
but  a  shelter;  this  is  home.  And  I  care  more 
for  it  now  that  the  signs  of  age  begin  to  settle  on 
it.  If  it  were  a  ruin,  I  should  love  it  best !" 

She  leaned  over  and  looked  down  at  the  two 
setters  lying  at  her  feet. 

"Do  you  care  less  for  the  dogs  of  the  house  as 
they  grow  older?" 

"I  think  more  of  them  and  take  better  care  of 
them  now  that  their  hunting  days  are  over." 

"The  friend  of  your  youth  —  the  friend  of 
your  middle  age  —  the  children  —  your  profes 
sion  —  the  world  of  human  life  —  this  house  — 
the  dogs  of  the  house  —  you  care  more  for  them 
all  as  time  passes?" 

"I  care  more  for  them  all  as  time  passes." 

Then  there  came  a  great  stillness  in  the  room 
—  the  stillness  of  all  listening  years. 

"'Am  I  the  only  thing  that  you  care  less  for  as 
time  passes?" 

There  was  no  reply. 

"Am  I  in  the  way?" 

There  was  no  reply. 


144  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

"Would  you  like  to  go  over  it  all  again  with 
another?" 

There  was  no  reply. 

She  had  hidden  her  face  in  her  hands  and 
pressed  her  head  against  the  end  of  the  sofa.  Her 
whole  figure  shrank  lower,  as  though  to  escape 
being  touched  by  him  —  to  escape  the  blow  of  his 
words.  No  words  came.  There  was  no  touch. 

A  moment  later  she  felt  that  he  must  be  stand 
ing  over  her,  looking  down  at  her.  She  would 
respond  to  his  hand  on  the  back  of  her  neck. 
He  must  be  kneeling  beside  her;  his  arms  would 
infold  her.  Then  with  a  kind  of  incredible  terror 
she  realized  that  he  was  not  there.  At  first  she 
could  so  little  believe  it,  that  with  her  face  still 
buried  in  one  hand  she  searched  the  air  for  him 
with  the  other,  expecting  to  touch  him. 

Then  she  cried  out  to  him: 

"Isn't  there  anything  you  can  say  to  me?" 

Silence   lasted. 

"Oh,  Fred!    Fred!    Fred!    Fred!" 

In  the  stillness  she  began  to  hear  something  — 
the  sound  of  his  footsteps  moving  on  the  carpet. 
She  sat  up. 


The  Room  of  the  Silences  145 

The  room  was  getting  darker ;  he  was  putting 
out  the  candles.  It  was  too  dark  already  to  see 
his  face.  With  fascination  she  began  to  watch 
his  hand.  How  steady  it  was  as  it  moved  among 
the  boughs,  extinguishing  the  lights.  Out  they 
went  one  by  one  and  back  into  their  darkness 
returned  the  emblems  of  darker  ages  —  the  Forest 
Memories. 

A  solitary  taper  was  left  burning  at  the  pin 
nacle  of  the  Tree  under  the  cross:  that  highest 
torch  of  love  shining  on  everything  that  had 
disappeared. 

He  quietly  put  it  out. 

Yet  the  light  seemed  not  put  out,  but  instantly 
to  have  travelled  through  the  open  parlor  door 
into  the  adjoining  room,  her  bedroom;  for  out 
of  that  there  now  streamed  a  suffused  red  light ; 
it  came  from  the  lamp  near  the  great  bed  in  the 
shadowy  corner. 

This  lamp  poured  its  light  through  a  lamp 
shade  having  the  semblance  of  a  bursting  crimson 
peony  as  some  morning  in  June  the  flower  with 
the  weight  of  its  own  splendor  falls  face  downward 
on  the  grass.  And  in  that  room  this  soft  lamp- 


146  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

light  fell  here  and  there  on  crimson  winter  dra 
peries.  He  had  been  living  alone  as  a  bachelor 
before  he  married  her.  After  they  became  en 
gaged  he,  having  watched  for  some  favorite  color 
of  hers,  had  had  this  room  redecorated  in  that 
shade.  Every  winter  since  she  had  renewed  in 
this  way  or  that  way  these  hangings,  and  now 
the  bridal  draperies  remained  unchanged  —  after 
the  changing  years. 

He  replaced  the  taper  against  the  wall  and 
came  over  and  stood  before  her,  holding  out  his 
hands  to  help  her  rise. 

She  arose  without  his  aid  and  passed  around 
him,  moving  toward  her  bedroom.  With  arms 
outstretched  guarding  her  but  not  touching  her, 
he  followed  close,  for  she  was  unsteady.  She 
entered  her  bedroom  and  crossed  to  the  door  of 
his  bedroom;  she  pushed  this  open,  and  keeping 
her  face  bent  aside  waited  for  him  to  go  in.  He 
went  in  and  she  closed  the  door  on  him  and  turned 
the  key.  Then  with  a  low  note,  with  which  the 
soul  tears  out  of  itself  something  that  has  been  its 
life,  she  made  a  circlet  of  her  white  arms  against 
the  door  and  laid  her  profile  within  this  circlet 
and  stood  —  the  figure  of  Memory. 


The  Room  of  the  Silences  147 

Thus  sometimes  a  stranger  sees  a  marble  figure 
standing  outside  a  tomb  where  some  story  of 
love  and  youth  ended:  some  stranger  in  a  far 
land,  —  walking  some  afternoon  in  those  quieter 
grounds  where  all  human  stories  end ;  an  autumn 
bird  in  the  bare  branches  fluting  of  its  mortality 
and  his  heart  singing  with  the  bird  of  one  lost  to 
him  —  lost  to  him  in  his  own  country. 

On  the  other  side  of  the  door  the  silence  was 
that  of  a  tomb.  She  had  felt  confident  —  so 
far  as  she  had  expected  anything  —  that  he  would 
speak  to  her  through  the  door,  try  to  open  it, 
plead  with  her  to  open  it.  Nothing  of  the  kind 
occurred. 

Why  did  he  not  come  back  ?  What  bolt  could 
have  separated  her  from  him  ? 

The  silence  began  to  weigh  upon  her. 

Then  in  the  tense  stillness  she  heard  him 
moving  quietly  about,  getting  ready  for  bed. 
There  were  the  same  movements,  familiar  to  her 
for  years.  She  would  not  open  the  door,  she 
could  not  leave  it,  she  could  not  stand,  no  support 
was  near,  and  she  sank  to  the  floor  and  sat  .there, 
leaning  her  brow  against  the  lintel. 


148  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

On  the  other  side  the  quiet  preparations  went  on. 

She  heard  him  take  off  his  coat  and  vest  and 
hang  them  on  the  back  of  a  chair.  The  buttons 
made  a  little  scraping  sound  against  the  wood. 
Then  he  went  to  his  dresser  and  took  off  his  collar 
and  tie,  and  he  opened  a  drawer  and  laid  out  a 
night-shirt.  She  heard  the  creaking  of  a  chair 
under  him  as  he  threw  one  foot  and  then  the 
other  up  across  his  knee  and  took  off  his  shoes 
and  socks.  Then  there  reached  her  the  soft 
movements  of  his  bare  feet  on  the  carpet  (de 
spite  her  agony  the  old  impulse  started  in  her 
to  caution  him  about  his  slippers).  Then  fol 
lowed  the  brushing  of  his  teeth  and  the  de 
liberate  bathing  of  his  hands.  Then  was  audible 
the  puff  of  breath  with  which  he  blew  out  his 
lamp  after  he  had  turned  it  low ;  and  then,  —  on 
the  other  side  of  the  door,  —  just  above  her  ear 
his  knock  sounded. 

The  same  knock  waited  for  and  responded  to 
throughout  the  years;  so  often  with  his  little 
variations  of  playfulness.  Many  a  time  in  early 
summer  when  out-of-doors  she  would  be  re 
minded  of  it  by  hearing  some  bird  sounding  its 


The  Room  of  the  Silences  149 

love  signal  on  a  piece  of  dry  wood  —  that  tap  of 
heart-beat.  Now  it  crashed  close  to  her  ear. 

Such  strength  came  back  to  her  that  she  rose 
as  lightly  as  though  her  flesh  were  but  will  and 
spirit.  When  he  knocked  again,  she  was  across 
the  room,  sitting  on  the  edge  of  her  bed  with  her 
palms  pressed  together  and  thrust  between  her 
knees:  the  instinctive  act  of  a  human  animal 
suddenly  chilled  to  the  bone. 

The  knocking  sounded  again. 

"Was  there  anything  you  needed?"  she  asked 
fearfully. 

There  was  no  response  but  another  knock. 

She  hurriedly  raised  her  voice  to  make  sure 
that  it  would  reach  him. 

"Was  there  anything  you  wanted?" 

As  no  response  came,  the  protective  maternal 
instinct  took  greater  alarm,  and  she  crossed  to 
the  door  of  his  room  and  she  repeated  her  one 
question : 

"Did  you  forget  anything?" 

Her  mind  refused  to  release  itself  from  the 
iteration  of  that  idea :  it  was  some  thing  —  not 
herself  —  that  he  wanted. 


150  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

He  knocked. 

Her  imagination,  long  oppressed  by  his  silence, 
now  made  of  his  knock  some  signal  of  distress. 
It  took  on  the  authority  of  an  appeal  not  to  be 
denied.  She  unlocked  the  door  and  opened  it  a 
little  way,  and  once  more  she  asked  her  one  poor 
question. 

His  answer  to  it  came  in  the  form  of  a  gentle 
pressure  against  the  door,  breaking  down  her 
resistance.  As  she  applied  more  strength,  this 
was  as  gently  overcome;  and  when  the  open 
ing  was  sufficient,  he  walked  past  her  into  the 
room. 

How  hushed  the  house!  How  still  the  world 
outside  as  the  cloud  wove  in  darkness  its  mantle 
of  light ! 


THE   WHITE   DAWN 


VI 

THE    WHITE    DAWN 

AY  was  breaking. 

The  crimson  curtains  of  the  bed 
room  were  drawn  close,  but  from 
behind  their  outer  edges  faint 
flanges  of  light  began  to  advance 
along  the  wall.  It  was  a  clear  light  reflected 
from  snow  which  had  sifted  in  against  the  window- 
panes,  was  banked  on  the  sills  outside,  ridged  the 
yard  fence,  peaked  the  little  gate-posts,  and  buried 
the  shrubbery.  There  was  no  need  to  look  out 
in  order  to  know  that  it  had  stopped  snowing, 
that  the  air  was  windless,  and  that  the  stars  were 
flashing  silver-pale  except  one  —  great  golden- 
croziered  shepherd  of  the  thick,  soft-footed, 
moving  host. 

It  was  Christmas  morning  on  the  effulgent 
Shield. 

Already  there  was  sufficient  light  in  the  room 
to  reveal  —  less  as  actual  things  than  as  brown 
shadows  of  the  memory  —  a  gay  company  of 


1 54  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

socks  and  stockings  hanging  from  the  mantel 
piece;  sufficient  to  give  outline  to  the  bulk  of  a 
man  asleep  on  the  edge  of  the  bed ;  and  it  exposed 
to  view  in  a  corner  of  the  room  farthest  from  the 
rays  a  woman  sitting  in  a  straight-backed  chair, 
a  shawl  thrown  about  her  shoulders  over  her 
night-dress. 

He  always  slept  till  he  was  awakened;  the 
children,  having  stayed  up  past  their  usual  bed 
time,  would  sleep  late  also;  she  had  the  white 
dawn  to  herself  in  quietness. 

She  needed  it. 

Sleep  could  not  have  come  to  her  had  she 
wished.  She  had  not  slept  and  she  had  not  lain 
down,  and  the  sole  endeavor  during  those  shat 
tered  hours  had  been  to  prepare  herself  for  his 
awakening.  She  was  not  yet  ready  —  she  felt 
that  during  the  rest  of  her  life  she  should  never 
be  quite  ready  to  meet  him  again.  Scant  time 
remained  now. 

Soon  all  over  the  Shield  indoor  merriment 
and  outdoor  noises  would  begin.  Wherever  in 
the  lowlands  any  many-chimneyed  city,  proud 
of  its  size,  rose  by  the  sweep  of  watercourses,  or 


The   White  Dawn  155 

any  little  inland  town  was  proud  of  its  smallness 
and  of  streets  that  terminated  in  the  fields ;  where- 
ever  any  hamlet  marked  the  point  at  which  two 
country  roads  this  morning  made  the  sign  of  the 
white  cross,  or  homesteads  stood  proudly  castled 
on  woody  hilltops,  or  warmed  the  heart  of  the 
beholder  from  amid  their  olive-dark  winter  pas 
tures;  or  far  away  on  the  shaggy  uplift  of  the 
Shield  wherever  any  cabin  clung  like  a  swallow's 
nest  against  the  gray  Appalachian  wall  —  every 
where  soon  would  begin  the  healthy  outbreak  of 
joy  among  men  and  women  and  children  —  glad 
about  themselves,  glad  in  one  another,  glad  of 
human  life  in  a  happy  world.  The  many-voiced 
roar  and  din  of  this  warm  carnival  lay  not  far 
away  from  her  across  the  cold  bar  of  silence. 

Soon  within  the  house  likewise  the  rush  of  the 
children's  feet  would  startle  her  ear;  they  would 
be  tugging  at  the  door,  tugging  at  her  heart. 
And  as  she  thought  of  this,  the  recollection  of  old 
simple  things  came  pealing  back  to  her  from 
behind  life's  hills.  The  years  parted  like  naked 
frozen  reeds,  and  she,  sorely  stricken  in  her 
womanhood,  fled  backward  till  she  herself  was  a 


156  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

child  again  —  safe  in  her  father's  and  mother's 
protection.  It  was  Christmas  morning,  and  she  in 
bare  feet  was  tipping  over  the  cold  floors  toward 
their  bedroom  —  toward  her  stockings. 

Her  father  and  mother !  How  she  needed  them 
at  this  moment:  they  had  been  sweethearts  all 
their  lives.  One  picture  of  them  rose  with  dis 
tinctness  before  her  —  for  the  wounding  picture 
always  comes  to  the  wounded  moment.  She  saw 
them  sitting  in  their  pew  far  down  toward  the 
chancel.  Through  a  stained  glass  window  (where 
there  was  a  ladder  of  angels)  the  light  fell  softly 
on  them  —  both  silver-haired;  and  as  with  the 
voices  of  children  they  were  singing  out  of  one 
book.  She  remembered  how  as  she  sat  between 
them  she  had  observed  her  father  slip  his  hand 
into  her  mother's  lap  and  clasp  hers  with  a  stead 
fastness  that  wedded  her  for  eternity;  and  thus 
over  their  linked  hands,  with  the  love  of  their 
youth  within  them  and  the  snows  of  the  years 
upon  them,  they  sang  together: 

"  Gently,  Lord,  O  gently  lead  us 
****** 

"  Through  the  changes  Thou'st  decreed  us." 


The   White  Dawn  157 

Her  father  and  mother  had  not  been  led  gently. 
They  had  known  more  than  common  share  of  life's 
shocks  and  violence,  its  wrongs  and  meannesses 
and  ills  and  griefs.  But  their  faith  had  never 
wavered  that  they  were  being  led  gently ;  so  long  as 
they  were  led  together,  to  them  it  was  gentle  lead 
ing:  the  richer  each  in  each  for  aught  whereby 
nature  or  man  could  leave  them  poorer ;  the  calmer 
for  the  shocks;  the  sweeter  for  the  sour;  the 
finer  with  one  another  because  of  life's  rudenesses. 
In  after  years  she  often  thought  of  them  as  faithful 
in  their  dust;  and  the  flowers  she  planted  over 
them  and  watered  many  a  bright  day  with  happy 
tears  brought  up  to  her  in  another  form  the  fresh 
ness  of  their  unwearied  union. 

That  was  what  she  had  not  doubted  her  own 
life  would  be  —  with  him  —  when  she  had  married 
him. 

From  the  moment  of  the  night  before  when  he 
had  forced  the  door  open  and  entered  her  room, 
they  had  not  exchanged  any  words  nor  a  glance. 
He  had  lain  down  and  soon  fallen  asleep;  ap 
parently  he  had  offered  that  to  her  as  for  the 


158  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

moment  at  least  his  solution  of  the  matter  —  that 
he  should  leave  her  to  herself  and  absent  himself 
in  slumber. 

The  instant  she  knew  him  to  be  asleep  she  set 
about  her  preparations. 

Before  he  awoke  she  must  be  gone  —  out  of  the 
house  —  anywhere  —  to  save  herself  from  living 
any  longer  with  him.  His  indifference  in  the  pres 
ence  of  her  suffering;  his  pitiless  withdrawal  from 
her  of  touch  and  glance  and  speech  as  she  had 
gone  down  into  that  darkest  of  life's  valleys;  his 
will  of  iron  that  since  she  had  insisted  upon  know 
ing  the  whole  truth,  know  it  she  should :  all  this 
left  her  wounded  and  stunned  as  by  an  incredible 
blow,  and  she  was  acting  first  from  the  instinct 
of  removing  herself  beyond  the  reach  of  further 
humiliation  and  brutality. 

Instinctively  she  took  off  her  wedding  ring 
and  laid  it  on  his  dresser  beside  his  watch :  he 
would  find  it  there  in  the  morning  and  he  could 
dispose  of  it.  Then  she  changed  her  dress  for  the 
plainest  heavy  one  and  put  on  heavy  walking 
shoes.  She  packed  into  a  handbag  a  few  necessary 
things  with  some  heirlooms  of  her  own.  Among 


The   White  Dawn  159 

the  latter  was  a  case  of  family  jewels ;  and  as  she 
opened  it,  her  eyes  fell  upon  her  mother's  thin 
wedding  ring  and  with  quick  reverence  she  slipped 
that  on  and  kissed  it  bitterly.  She  lifted  out  also 
her  mother's  locket  containing  a  miniature  da 
guerreotype  of  her  father  and  dutifully  fed  her 
eyes  on  that.  Her  father  was  not  silver-haired 
then,  but  raven-locked ;  with  eyes  that  men  feared 
at  times  but  no  woman  ever. 

His  eyes  were  on  her  now  as  so  often  in  girlhood 
when  he  had  curbed  her  exuberance  and  guided 
her  waywardness.  He  was  watching  as  she, 
coarsely  wrapped  and  carrying  some  bundle  of 
things  of  her  own,  opened  her  front  door,  left  her 
footprints  in  the  snow  on  the  porch,  and  passed 
out  —  wading  away.  Those  eyes  of  his  saw  what 
took  place  the  next  day :  the  happiness  of  Christ 
mas  morning  turned  into  horror;  the  children 
wild  with  distress  and  crying  —  the  servants 
dumb  —  the  inquiry  at  neighbors'  houses  —  the 
news  spreading  to  the  town  —  the  papers  —  the 
black  ruin.  And  from  him  two  restraining  words 
issued  for  her  ear : 

" My  daughter!" 


160  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

Passionately  she  bore  the  picture  to  her  lips  and 
her  pride  answered  him.  And  so  answering,  it 
applied  a  torch  to  her  blood  and  her  blood  took 
fire  and  a  flame  of  rage  spread  through  and  swept 
her.  She  stopped  her  preparations:  she  had 
begun  to  think  as  well  as  to  feel. 

She  unpacked  her  travelling  bag,  putting  each 
article  back  into  its  place  with  exaggerated  pains. 
Having  done  this,  she  stood  in  the  middle  of  the 
floor,  looking  about  her  irresolute :  then  respond 
ing  to  that  power  of  low  suggestion  which  is  one 
of  anger's  weapons,  she  began  to  devise  malice. 
She  went  to  a  wardrobe  and  stooping  down  took 
from  a  bottom  drawer  —  where  long  ago  it  had 
been  stored  away  under  everything  else  —  a  shawl 
that  had  been  her  grandmother's;  a  brindled 
crewel  shawl,  —  sometimes  worn  by  superannu 
ated  women  of  a  former  generation;  a  garment 
of  hideousness.  Once,  when  a  little  girl,  she  had 
loyally  jerked  it  off  her  grandmother  because  it 
added  to  her  ugliness  and  decrepitude. 

She  shook  this  out  with  mocking  eyes  and  threw 
it  decoratively  around  her  shoulders.  She  strode 
to  the  gorgeous  peony  lampshade  and  lifting  it  off, 


The    White  Dawn  161 

gibbeted  it  and  scattered  the  fragments  on  the 
floor.  She  turned  the  lamp  up  as  high  as  it  would 
safely  burn  so  that  the  huge  lidless  eye  of  it 
would  throw  its  full  glare  on  him  and  her.  She 
drew  a  rocking  chair  to  the  foot  of  the  bed  and 
seating  herself  put  her  forefinger  up  to  each  temple 
and  drew  out  from  their  hiding  places  under  the 
mass  of  her  black  hair  two  long  gray  locks  and  let 
these  hang  down  haglike  across  her  bosom.  She 
banished  the  carefully  nourished  look  of  youth 
from  her  face  —  dropped  the  will  to  look  young  — 
and  allowed  the  forced-back  years  to  rush  into  it  — 
into  the  wastage,  the  wreckage,  which  he  and 
Nature,  assisting  each  other  so  ably,  had  wrought 
in  her. 

She  sat  there  half-crazed,  rocking  noisily; 
waiting  for  the  glare  of  the  lamp  to  cause  him  to 
open  his  eyes ;  and  she  smiled  upon  him  in  exulta 
tion  of  vengeance  that  she  was  to  live  on  there  in 
his  house  —  his  house. 

After  a  while  a  darker  mood  came  over  her. 

With  noiseless  steps  lest  she  awake  him,  she 
began  to  move  about  the  room.  She  put  out  the 
lamp  and  lighted  her  candle  and  set  it  where  it 


1 62  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

would  be  screened  from  his  face;  and  where  the 
shadow  of  the  chamber  was  heaviest,  into  that 
shadow  she  retired  and  in  it  she  sat  —  with  furtive 
look  to  see  whether  he  observed  her. 

A  pall-like  stillness  deepened  about  the  bed 
where  he  lay. 

Running  in  her  veins  a  wellnigh  pure  stream 
across  the  generations  was  Anglo-Saxon  blood  of 
the  world's  fiercest ;  floating  in  the  tide  of  it  pas 
sions  of  old  family  life  which  had  dyed  history  for  all 
time  in  tragedies  of  false  friendship,  false  love,  and 
false  battle ;  but  fiercest  ever  about  the  marriage 
bed  and  the  betrayal  of  its  vow.  A  thousand  years 
from  this  night  some  wronged  mother  of  hers, 
sitting  beside  some  sleeping  father  of  hers  in  their 
forest-beleaguered  castle  —  the  moonlight  stream 
ing  in  upon  him  through  the  javelined  casement 
and  putting  before  her  the  manly  beauty  of  him  — 
the  blond  hair  matted  thick  on  his  forehead  as  his 
helmet  had  left  it,  his  mouth  reddening  in  his 
slumber  under  its  curling  gold  —  some  mother  of 
hers  whom  he  had  carried  off  from  other  men  by 
might  of  his  sword,  thus  sitting  beside  him  and 
knowing  him  to  be  colder  to  her  now  than  the 


The   White  Dawn  163 

moon's  dead  rays,  might  have  watched  those  rays 
as  they  travelled  away  from  his  figure  and  put  a 
gleam  on  his  sword  hanging  near:  a  thousand 
years  ago :  some  mother  of  hers. 

It  is  when  the  best  fails  our  human  nature  that 
the  worst  volunteers  so  often  to  take  its  place. 
The  best  and  the  worst  —  these  are  the  sole 
alternatives  which  many  a  soul  seems  to  be  capable 
of  making:  hence  life's  spectacle  of  swift  over 
throw,  of  amazing  collapse,  ever  present  about  us. 
Only  the  heroic  among  both  men  and  women, 
losing  the  best  as  their  first  choice,  fight  their  way 
through  defeat  to  the  standard  of  the  second  best 
and  fight  on  there.  And  whatever  one  may  think 
of  the  legend  otherwise,  abundant  experience 
justifies  the  story  that  it  was  the  Archangel  who 
fell  to  the  pit.  The  low  never  fall  far:  how  can 
they  ?  They  already  dwell  on  the  bottom  of  things, 
and  many  a  time  they  are  to  be  seen  there  with 
vanity  that  they  should  inhabit  such  a  privileged 
highland. 

During  the  first  of  these  hours  which  stretched 
for  her  into  the  tragic  duration  of  a  lifetime,  it  was 
a  successive  falling  from  a  height  of  moral 


1 64  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

splendor;  her  nature  went  down  through  swift 
stages  to  the  lowest  she  harbored  either  in  the 
long  channel  of  inheritance  or  as  the  stirred  sedi 
ment  of  her  own  imperfections.  And  as  is  un 
fortunately  true,  this  descent  into  moral  darkness 
possessed  the  grateful  illusion  that  it  was  an  ascent 
into  new  light.  All  evil  prompting  became  good 
suggestion;  every  injustice  made  its  claim  to  be 
justification.  She  enjoyed  the  elation  of  feeling 
that  she  was  dragging  herself  out  of  life's  quick 
sands  upward  to  some  rock  where  there  might  be 
loneliness  for  her,  but  where  there  would  be  clean 
ness.  The  love  which  consumed  her  for  him  raged 
in  her  as  hatred;  and  hatred  is  born  into  perfect 
mastery  of  its  weapons.  However  young,  it 
needs  not  to  wait  for  training  in  order  to  know 
how  to  destroy. 

He  presented  himself  to  her  as  a  character  at 
last  revealed  in  its  faithlessness  and  low  carnal  pro 
pensities.  What  rankled  most  poignantly  in  this 
spectacle  of  his  final  self-exposure  was  the  fact  that 
the  cloven  hoof  should  have  been  found  on  noble 
mountain  tops — that  he  should  have  attempted 
to  better  his  disguise  by  dwelling  near  regions  of 


The    White  Dawn  165 

sublimity.  Of  all  hypocrisy  the  kind  most  detest 
able  to  her  was  that  which  dares  live  within  spirit 
ual  fortresses;  and  now  his  whole  story  of  the 
Christmas  Tree,  the  solemn  marshalling  of  words 
about  the  growth  of  the  world's  spirit  —  about  the 
sacrifice  of  the  lower  in  ourselves  to  the  higher  — 
this  cant  now  became  to  her  the  invocation  and 
homage  of  the  practised  impostor :  he  had  indeed 
carried  the  Christmas  Tree  on  his  shoulder  into 
the  manger.  Not  the  Manger  of  Immortal  Purity 
for  mankind  but  the  manger  of  his  own  bestiality. 

Thus  scorn  and  satire  became  her  speech;  she 
soared  above  him  with  spurning;  a  frenzy  of 
poisoned  joy  racked  her  that  at  the  moment  when 
he  had  let  her  know  that  he  wanted  to  be  free  — 
at  that  moment  she  might  tell  him  he  had  won  his 
freedom  at  the  cheap  price  of  his  unworthiness. 

And  thus  as  she  descended,  she  enjoyed  the 
triumph  of  rising;  so  the  devil  in  us  never  lacks 
argument  that  he  is  the  celestial  guide. 

Moreover,  hatred  never  dwells  solitary;  it 
readily  finds  boon  companions.  And  at  one 
period  of  the  night  she  began  to  look  back  upon 
her  experience  with  a  curious  sense  of  prior  fa- 


1 66  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

miliarity  —  to  see  it  as  a  story  already  known  to 
her  at  second  hand.  She  viewed  it  as  the  first  stage 
of  one  of  those  tragedies  that  later  find  their  way 
into  the  care  of  family  physicians,  into  the  briefs 
of  lawyers,  into  the  confidence  of  clergymen, 
into  the  papers  and  divorce  courts,  and  that  re 
ceive  their  final  flaying  or  canonization  on  the 
stage  and  in  novels  of  the  time.  Sitting  at  a 
distance,  she  had  within  recent  years  studied 
in  a  kind  of  altruistic  absorption  how  the  nation's 
press,  the  nation's  science  of  medicine,  the  nation's 
science  of  law,  the  nation's  practice  of  religion,  and 
the  nation's  imaginative  literature  were  all  at 
work  with  the  same  national  omen  —  the  decay  of 
the  American  family  and  the  downfall  of  the  home. 
Now  this  new  pestilence  raging  in  other  regions 
of  the  country  had  incredibly  reached  her,  she 
thought,  on  the  sheltered  lowlands  where  the 
older  traditions  of  American  home  life  still  lay  like 
foundation  rock.  The  corruption  of  it  had  at 
tacked  him ;  the  ruin  of  it  awaited  her ;  and  thus 
to-night  she  took  her  place  among  those  women 
whom  the  world  first  hears  of  as  in  hospitals  and 
sanitariums  and  places  of  refuge  and  in  their 


The    White  Dawn  167 

graves  —  and  more  sadly  elsewhere;  whose  mis 
fortunes  interested  the  press  and  whose  types  at 
tracted  the  novelists. 

She  was  one  of  them. 

They  swarmed  about  her;  one  by  one  she 
recognized  them :  the  woman  who  unable  to  bear 
up  under  her  tragedy  soon  sinks  into  eternity  — 
or  walks  into  it ;  the  woman  who  disappears  from 
the  scene  and  somewhere  under  another  name  or 
with  another  lot  lives  on  —  devoting  herself  to 
memory  or  to  forgetf ulness ;  the  woman  who  stays 
on  in  the  house,  giving  to  the  world  no  sign  for  the 
sake  of  everything  else  that  still  remains  to  her  but 
living  apart — on  the  other  side  of  the  locked  door; 
the  woman  who  stays  on  without  locking  the  door, 
half -hating,  half-loving  —  the  accepted  and  re 
jected  compromise;  the  woman  who  welcomes 
the  end  of  the  love-drama  as  the  beginning  of 
peace  and  the  cessation  of  annoyances;  the 
woman  who  begins  to  act  her  tragedy  to  ser 
vants  and  children  and  acquaintances  —  reaping 
sympathy  for  herself  and  sowing  ruin  and  torture 
—  for  him ;  the  woman  who  drops  the  care  of 
house,  ends  his  comforts,  thus  forcing  the  sharp 


1 68  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

reminder  of  her  value  as  at  least  an  investment 
toward  his  general  well-being;  the  woman 
who  endeavors  to  .rekindle  dying  coals  by 
fanning  them  with  fresh  fascinations ;  the  woman 
who  plays  upon  jealousy  and  touches  the  male 
instinct  to  keep  one's  own  though  little  prized 
lest  another  acquire  it  and  prize  it  more;  the 
woman  who  sets  a  watch  to  discover  the  other 
woman :  they  swarmed  about  her,  she  identified 
each. 

And  she  dismissed  them.  They  brought  her  no 
aid;  she  shrank  from  their  companionship;  a 
strange  dread  moved  her  lest  they  should  discover 
her.  One  only  she  detached  from  the  throng  and 
for  a  while  withdrew  with  her  into  a  kind  of  dual 
solitude :  the  woman  who  when  so  rejected  turns 
to  another  man  —  the  man  who  is  waiting  some 
where  near. 

The  man  she  turned  to,  who  for  years  had 
hovered  near,  was  the  country  doctor,  her  hus 
band's  tried  and  closest  friend,  whose  children 
were  asleep  upstairs  with  her  children.  During 
all  these  years  her  secret  had  been  —  the  doctor. 
When  she  had  come  as  a  bride  into  that  neighbor- 


The   White  Dawn  169 

hood,  he,  her  husband's  senior  by  several  years, 
was  already  well  established  in  his  practice.  He 
had  attended  her  at  the  birth  of  her  first  child; 
never  afterwards.  As  time  passed,  she  had  dis 
covered  that  he  loved  her;  she  could  never  have 
him  again.  This  had  dealt  his  professional  repu 
tation  a  wound,  but  he  understood,  and  he  wel 
comed  the  wound. 

Many  a  night,  lying  awake  near  her  window, 
through  which  noises  from  the  turnpike  plainly 
reached  her,  all  earthly  happiness  asleep  along 
side  her,  she  could  hear  the  doctor's  buggy  pass 
ing  on  its  way  to  some  patient,  or  on  its  return 
from  the  town  where  he  had  patients  also.  Many 
a  time  she  had  heard  it  stop  at  the  front  gate  : 
the  road  of  his  life  there  turned  in  to  her.  There 
were  nights  of  pitch  darkness  and  beating  rain; 
and  sometimes  on  these  she  had  to  know  that 
he  was  out  there. 

Long  she  sat  in  the  shadow  of  her  room, 
looking  towards  the  bed  where  her  husband 
slept,  but  sending  the  dallying  vision  toward  the 
doctor.  He  would  be  at  the  Christmas  party; 
she  would  be  dancing  with  him. 


170  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

Clouds  and  darkness  descended  upon  the  plain 
of  life  and  enveloped  it.  She  groped  her  way, 
torn  and  wounded,  downward  along  the  old  lost 
human  paths. 

The  endless  night  scarcely  moved  on. 
*  *  *  *  * 

She  was  wearied  out,  she  was  exhausted. 
There  is  anger  of  such  intensity  that  it  scorches 
and  shrivels  away  the  very  temptations  that  are 
its  fuel;  nothing  can  long  survive  the  blast  of 
that  white  flame,  and  being  unfed,  it  dies  out. 
Moreover,  it  is  the  destiny  of  a  portion  of  man 
kind  that  they  are  enjoined  by  their  very  nobility 
from  winning  low  battles;  these  always  go 
against  them:  the  only  victories  for  them  are 
won  when  they  are  leading  the  higher  forces  of 
human  nature  in  life's  upward  conflicts. 

She  was  weary,  she  was  exhausted;  there  was 
in  her  for  a  while  neither  moral  light  nor  moral 
darkness.  Her  consciousness  lay  like  a  bound 
less  plain  on  which  nothing  is  visible.  She  had 
passed  into  a  great  calm;  and  slowly  there  was 
borne  across  her  spirit  a  clearness  that  is  like 
the  radiance  of  the  storm-winged  sky. 


The    White  Dawn  171 

And  now  in  this  calm,  in  this  clearness,  two 
small  white  figures  appeared  —  her  children. 
Hitherto  the  energies  of  her  mind  had  grappled 
with  the  problem  of  her  future;  now  memories 
began  —  memories  that  decide  more  perhaps 
than  anything  else  for  us.  And  memories  began 
with  her  children. 

She  arose  without  making  any  noise,  took  her 
candle,  and  screening  it  with  the  palm  of  her 
hand,  started  upstairs. 

There  were  two  ways  by  either  of  which  she 
could  go;  a  narrow  rear  stairway  leading  from 
the  parlor  straight  to  their  bedrooms,  and  the 
broad  stairway  in  the  front  hall.  From  the  old 
maternal  night-habit  she  started  to  take  the 
shorter  way  but  thought  of  the  parlor  and  drew 
back.  This  room  had  become  too  truly  the 
Judgment  Seat  of  the  Years.  She  shrank  from 
it  as  one  who  has  been  arraigned  may  shrink 
from  a  tribunal  where  sentence  has  been  pro 
nounced  which  changes  the  rest  of  life.  Its 
flowers,  its  fruits,  its  toys,  its  ribbons,  but  deepened 
the  derision  and  the  bitterness.  And  the  ever 
green  there  in  the  middle  of  the  room  —  it  be- 


172  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

came  to  her  as  that  tree  of  the  knowledge  of  good 
and  evil  which  at  Creation's  morning  had  driven 
Woman  from  Paradise. 

She  chose  the  other  way  and  started  toward 
the  main  hall  of  the  house,  but  paused  in  the 
doorway  and  looked  back  at  the  bed;  what  if  he 
should  awake  in  the  dark,  alone,  with  no  knowl 
edge  of  where  she  was?  Would  he  call  out  to 
her  —  with  what  voice  ?  Would  he  come  to  seek 
her  —  with  what  emotions?  (The  tide  of  memo 
ries  was  setting  in  now  —  the  drift  back  to  the 
old  mooring.) 

Hunt  for  her !  How  those  words  fell  like  iron 
strokes  on  the  ear  of  remembrance.  They  regis 
tered  the  beginning  of  the  whole  trouble.  Up  to 
the  last  two  years  his  first  act  upon  reaching 
home  had  been  to  seek  her.  It  had  even  been 
her  playfulness  at  times  to  slip  from  room  to 
room  for  the  delight  of  proving  how  persistently 
he  would  prolong  his  search.  But  one  day  some 
two  years  before  this,  when  she  had  entered  his 
study  about  the  usual  hour  of  his  return,  bring 
ing  flowers  for  his  writing  desk,  she  saw  him 
sitting  there,  hat  on,  driving  gloves  on,  making 


The   White  Dawn  173 

some  notes.  The  sight  had  struck  the  flowers 
from  her  hands;  she  swiftly  gathered  them  up, 
and  going  to  her  room,  shut  herself  in ;  she  knew 
it  was  the  beginning  of  the  end. 

The  Shadow  which  lurks  in  every  bridal  lamp 
had  become  the  Spectre  of  the  bedchamber. 

When  they  met  later  that  day,  he  was  not 
even  aware  of  what  he  had  done  or  failed  to  do, 
the  change  in  him  was  so  natural  to  himself. 
Everything  else  had  followed :  the  old  look  dying 
out  of  the  eyes;  the  old  touch  abandoning  the 
hands;  less  time  for  her  in  the  house,  more  for 
work;  constraint  beginning  between  them,  the 
awkwardness  of  reserve;  she  seeing  Nature's 
movement  yet  refusing  to  believe  it;  then  at  last 
resolving  to  know  to  the  uttermost  and  choosing 
her  bridal  night  as  the  hour  of  the  ordeal. 

If  he  awoke,  would  he  come  to  seek  her  — 
with  what  feelings? 

She  went  on  upstairs,  holding  the  candle  to  one 
side  with  her  right  hand  and  supporting  herself 
by  the  banisters  with  her  left.  There  was  a  turn 
in  the  stairway  at  the  second  floor,  and  here  the 
candle  rays  fell  on  the  face  of  the  tall  clock  in 


The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

the  hallway.  She  sat  down  on  a  step,  putting 
the  candle  beside  her;  and  there  she  remained, 
her  elbows  on  her  knees,  her  face  resting  on  her 
palms;  and  into  the  abyss  of  the  night  dropped 
the  tranquil  strokes.  More  memories ! 

She  was  by  nature  not  only  alive  to  all  life 
but  alive  to  surrounding  lifeless  things.  Much 
alone  in  the  house,  she  had  sent  her  happiness 
overflowing  its  dumb  environs  —  humanizing 
these  —  drawing  them  toward  her  by  a  gracious 
responsive  symbolism  —  extending  speech  over 
realms  which  nature  has  not  yet  awakened  to  it 
or  which  she  may  have  struck  into  speechlessness 
long  aeons  past. 

She  had  symbolized  the  clock;  it  was  the 
wooden  God  of  Hours;  she  had  often  feigned 
that  it  might  be  propitiated;  and  opening  the 
door  of  it  she  would  pin  inside  the  walls  little 
clusters  of  blossoms  as  votive  offerings:  if  it 
would  only  move  faster  and  bring  him  home ! 
The  usual  hour  of  his  return  from  college  was 
three  in  the  afternoon.  She  had  symbolized  that 
hour;  one  stroke  for  him,  one  for  her,  one  for 
the  children  —  the  three  in  one  —  the  trinity  of 
the  household. 


The   White  Dawn  175 

She  sat  there  on  the  step  with  the  candle  burn 
ing  beside  her. 

The  clock  struck  three!  The  sound  went 
through  the  house:  down  to  him,  up  to  the  chil 
dren,  into  her.  It  was  like  a  cry  of  a  night 
watch :  all  is  well ! 

It  was  the  first  sound  that  had  reached  her 
from  any  source  during  this  agony,  and  now  it 
did  not  come  from  humanity,  but  from  outside 
humanity;  from  Time  itself  which  brings  us  to 
gether  and  holds  us  together  as  long  as  possible 
and  then  separates  us  and  goes  on  its  way — 
indifferent  whether  we  are  together  or  apart; 
Time  which  welds  the  sands  into  the  rock  and 
then  wears  the  rock  away  to  its  separate  sands 
and  sends  the  level  tide  softly  over  them. 

Once  for  him,  once  for  her,  once  for  the  chil 
dren  !  She  took  up  the  candle  and  went  upstairs 
to  them. 

For  a  while  she  stood  beside  the  bed  in  one 
room  where  the  two  little  girls  were  asleep  clasp 
ing  each  other,  cheek  against  cheek;  and  in  an 
other  room  at  the  bedside  of  the  two  little  boys, 
their  backs  turned  on  one  another  and  each  with 


176  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

a  hand  doubled  into  a  promising  fist  outside  the 
cover.  In  a  few  years  how  differently  the  four 
would  be  divided  and  paired;  each  boy  a  young 
husband,  each  girl  a  young  wife;  and  out  of  the 
lives  of  the  two  of  them  who  were  hers  she  would 
then  drop  into  some  second  place.  If  to-night 
she  were  realizing  what  befalls  a  wife  when  she 
becomes  the  Incident  to  her  husband,  she  would 
then  realize  what  befalls  a  woman  when  the 
mother  becomes  the  Incident  to  her  children: 
Woman,  twice  the  Incident  in  Nature's  impartial 
economy !  Her  son  would  playfully  confide  it  to 
his  bride  that  she  must  bear  with  his  mother's 
whims  and  ways.  Her  daughter  would  caution 
her  husband  that  he  must  overlook  peculiarities 
and  weaknesses.  The  very  study  of  perfection 
which  she  herself  had  kindled  and  fanned  in  them 
as  the  illumination  of  their  lives  they  would  now 
turn  upon  her  as  a  searchlight  of  her  failings. 

He  downstairs  would  never  do  that !  She 
could  not  conceive  of  his  discussing  her  with  any 
human  being.  Even  though  he  should  some  day 
desert  her,  he  would  never  discuss  her. 

She  had  lived  so  secure  in  the  sense  of  him 


The    White  Dawn  177 

thus  standing  with  her  against  the  world,  that  it 
was  the  sheer  withdrawal  of  his  strength  from 
her  to-night  that  had  dealt  her  the  cruelest  blow. 
But  now  she  began  to  ask  herself  whether  his 
protection  had  failed  her.  Could  he  have  recog 
nized  the  situation  without  rendering  it  worse? 
Had  he  put  his  arms  around  her,  might  she  not 
have  —  struck  at  him  ?  Had  he  laid  a  finger- 
weight  of  sympathy  on  her,  would  it  not  have 
left  a  scar  for  life?  Any  words  of  his,  would 
they  not  have  rung  in  her  ears  unceasingly?  To 
pass  it  over  was  as  though  it  had  never  been  — 
was  not  that  his  protection? 

She  suddenly  felt  a  desire  to  go  down  into  the 
parlor.  She  kissed  her  child  in  each  room  and 
she  returned  and  kissed  the  doctor's  children  — 
with  memory  of  their  mother;  and  then  she  de 
scended  by  the  rear  stairway. 

She  set  her  candle  on  the  table,  where  earlier 
in  the  night  she  had  placed  the  lamp  —  near  the 
manuscript  —  and  she  sat  down  and  looked  at 
that  remorsefully:  she  had  ignored  it  when  he 
placed  it  there. 

He  had  made  her  the  gift  of  his  work  —  dedi- 


1 78  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

cated  to  her  the  triumphs  of  his  toil.  It  was  his 
deep  cry  to  her  to  share  with  him  his  widening 
career  and  enter  with  him  into  the  world's  serv 
ice.  She  crossed  her  hands  over  it  awhile,  and 
then  she  left  it. 

The  low-burnt  candle  did  not  penetrate  far 
into  the  darkness  of  the  immense  parlor.  There 
was  an  easy  chair  near  her  piano  and  her  music. 
After  playing  when  alone,  she  would  often  sit 
there  and  listen  to  the  echoes  of  those  influences 
that  come  into  the  soul  from  music  only,  —  the 
rhythmic  hauntings  of  some  heaven  of  diviner 
beauty.  She  sat  there  now  quite  in  darkness  and 
closed  her  eyes;  and  upon  her  ear  began  faintly 
to  beat  the  sad  sublime  tones  of  his  story. 

One  of  her  delights  in  growing  things  on  the 
farm  had  been  to  watch  the  youth  of  the  hemp 
—  a  field  of  it,  tall  and  wandlike  and  tufted.  If 
the  north  wind  blew  upon  it,  the  myriad  stalks 
as  by  a  common  impulse  swayed  southward ;  if  a 
zephyr  from  the  south  crossed  it,  all  heads  were 
instantly  bowed  before  the  north.  West  wind 
sent  it  east  and  east  wind  sent  it  west. 

And  so,  it  had  seemed  to  her,  is  that  ever  living 


The    White  Dawn  179 

world  which  we  sometimes  call  the  field  of  hu 
man  life  in  its  perpetual  summer.  It  is  run 
through  by  many  different  laws;  governed  by 
many  distinct  forces,  each  of  which  strives  to 
control  it  wholly  —  but  never  does.  Selfishness 
blows  on  it  like  a  parching  sirocco,  and  all  things 
seem  to  bow  to  the  might  of  selfishness.  Gener 
osity  moves  across  the  expanse,  and  all  things  are 
seen  responsive  to  what  is  generous.  Place 
yourself  where  life  is  lowest  and  everything  like 
an  avalanche  is  rushing  to  the  bottom.  Place 
yourself  where  character  is  highest,  and  lo!  the 
whole  world  is  but  one  struggle  upward  to  what 
is  high.  You  see  what  you  care  to  see,  and  find 
what  you  wish  to  find. 

In  his  story  of  the  Forest  and  the  Heart  he 
had  wanted  to  trace  but  one  law,  and  he  had 
traced  it;  he  had  drawn  all  things  together  and 
bent  them  before  its  majesty :  the  ancient  law  of 
Sacrifice.  Of  old  the  high  sacrificed  to  the  low; 
afterwards  the  low  to  the  high :  once  the  sacrifice 
of  others;  now  the  sacrifice  of  ourselves;  but 
always  in  ourselves  of  the  lower  to  the  higher  in 
order  that,  dying,  we  may  live. 


i8o  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

With  this  law  he  had  made  his  story  a  story  of 
the  world. 

The  star  on  the  Tree  bore  it  back  to  Chaldaea; 
the  candle  bore  it  to  ancient  Persia;  the  cross  bore 
it  to  the  Nile  and  Isis  and  Osiris;  the  dove  bore 
it  to  Syria;  the  bell  bore  it  to  Confucius;  the 
drum  bore  it  to  Buddha;  the  drinking  horn  to 
Greece;  the  tinsel  to  Romulus  and  Rome;  the 
doll  to  Abraham  and  Isaac;  the  masks  to  Gaul; 
the  mistletoe  to  Britain, — and  all  brought  it  to 
Christ,  —  Christ  the  latest  world-ideal  of  sacrifice 
that  is  self-sacrifice  and  of  the  giving  of  all  for  all. 

The  story  was  for  herself,  he  had  said,  and  for 
himself. 

Himself!  Here  at  last  all  her  pain  and  wan 
dering  of  this  night  ended :  at  the  bottom  of  her 
wound  where  rankled  his  problem. 

From  this  problem  she  had  most  shrunk  and 
into  this  she  now  entered :  She  sacrificed  herself 
in  him !  She  laid  upon  herself  his  temptation 

and  his  struggle. 

***** 

Taking  her  candle,  she  passed  back  into  her 
bedroom  and  screened  it  where  she  had  screened 
it  before;  then  went  into  his  bedroom. 


The    White  Dawn  181 

She  put  her  wedding  ring  on  again  with 
blanched  lips.  She  went  to  his  bedside,  and 
drawing  to  the  pillow  the  chair  on  which  his 
clothes  were  piled,  sat  down  and  laid  her  face 
over  on  it;  and  there  in  that  shrine  of  feeling 
where  speech  is  formed,  but  whence  it  never 
issues,  she  made  her  last  communion  with  him: 

"  You,  to  whom  I  gave  my  youth  and  all  that 
youth  could  mean  to  me;  -whose  children  I  have 
borne  and  nurtured  at  my  breast  —  all  of  whose 
eyes  I  have  seen  open  and  the  eyes  of  some  of 
whom  I  have  closed;  husband  of  my  girlhood, 
loved  as  no  woman  ever  loved  the  man  who  took 
her  home;  strength  and  laughter  of  his  house; 
helper  of  what  is  best  in  me;  my  defender  against 
things  in  myself  that  I  cannot  govern;  pathfinder 
of  my  future;  rock  of  the  ebbing  years !  Though 
my  hair  turn  white  as  driven  snow  and  flesh 
wither  to  the  bone,  I  shall  never  cease  to  be  the 
flame  that  you  yourself  have  kindled. 

"But  never  again  to  you!  Let  the  stillness  of 
nature  fall  where  there  must  be  stillness  I  Peace 
come  with  its  peace!  And  the  room  which  heard 
our  whisperings  of  the  night,  let  it  be  the  Room  of 


1 82  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

the  Silences  —  the  Long  Silences!  Adieu,  cross  of 
living  fire  that  I  have  so  clung  to!  —  Adieu!  — 
Adieu !  —  Adieu !  —  Adieu !  " 

She  remained  as  motionless  as  though  she  had 
fallen  asleep  or  would  not  lift  her  head  until  there 
had  ebbed  out  of  her  life  upon  his  pillow  the  last 
drop  of  things  that  must  go. 

She  there  —  her  whitening  head  buried  on  his 
pillow:  it  was  Life's  Calvary  of  the  Snows. 

The  dawn  found  her  sitting  in  the  darkest 
corner  of  the  room,  and  there  it  brightened  about 
her  desolately.  The  moment  drew  near  when 
she  must  awaken  him;  the  ordeal  of  their  meet 
ing  must  be  over  before  the  children  rushed 
downstairs  or  the  servants  knocked. 

She  had  plaited  her  hair  in  two  heavy  braids, 
and  down  each  braid  the  gray  told  its  story 
through  the  black.  And  she  had  brushed  it 
frankly  away  from  brow  and  temples  so  that  the 
contour  of  her  head  —  one  of  nature's  noblest  — 
was  seen  in  its  simplicity.  It  is  thus  that  the 
women  of  her  land  sometimes  prepare  themselves 
at  the  ceremony  of  their  baptism  into  a  new  life. 


The  White  Dawn  183 

She  had  put  on  a  plain  night-dress,  and  her 
face  and  shoulders  rising  out  of  this  had  the 
austerity  of  marble  —  exempt  not  from  ruin,  but 
exempt  from  lesser  mutation.  She  looked  down 
at  her  wrists  once  and  made  a  little  instinctive 
movement  with  her  fingers  as  if  to  hide  them 
under  the  sleeves. 

Then  she  approached  the  bed.  As  she  did  so, 
she  turned  back  midway  and  quickly  stretched 
her  arms  toward  the  wall  as  though  to  flee  to  it. 
Then  she  drew  nearer,  a  new  pitiful  fear  of  him 
in  her  eyes  —  the  look  of  the  rejected. 

So  she  stood  an  instant  and  then  she  reclined 
on  the  edge  of  the  bed,  resting  on  one  elbow  and 
looking  down  at  him. 

For  years  her  first  words  to  him  on  this  day 
had  been  the  world's  best  greeting: 

"A  Merry  Christmas!" 

She  tried  to  summon  the  words  to  her  lips  and 
have  them  ready. 

At  the  pressure  of  her  body  on  the  bed  he 
>pened  his  eyes  and  instantly  looked  to  see  what 
the  whole  truth  was:  how  she  had  come  out  of 
it  all,  what  their  life  was  to  be  henceforth,  what 


1 84  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

their  future  would  be  worth.  But  at  the  sight  of 
her  so  changed  —  something  so  gone  out  of  her 
forever  —  with  a  quick  cry  he  reached  his  arms 
for  her.  She  struggled  to  get  away  from  him; 
but  he,  winding  his  arms  shelteringly  about  the 
youth-shorn  head,  drew  her  face  close  down 
against  his  face.  She  caught  at  one  of  the  braids 
of  her  hair  and  threw  it  across  her  eyes,  and  then 
silent  convulsive  sobs  rent  and  tore  her,  tore  her. 
The  torrent  of  her  tears  raining  down  into  his 
tears. 

Tears  not  for  Life's  faults  but  for  Life  when 
there  are  no  faults.  They  locked  in  each  other's 
arms  —  trying  to  save  each  other  on  Nature's 
vast  lonely,  tossing,  uncaring  sea. 

The  rush  of  children's  feet  was  heard  in  the 
hall  and  there  was  smothered  laughter  at  the 
door  and  the  soft  turning  of  the  knob. 

It  was  Christmas  Morning* 

The  sun  rose  golden  and  gathering  up  its  gold 
threw  it  forward  over  the  gladness  of  the  Shield. 
The  farmhouse  —  such  as  the  poet  had  sung  of 
when  he  could  not  help  singing  of  American 


The    White  Dawn  185 

home  life  —  looked  out  from  under  its  winter 
roof  with  the  cheeriness  of  a  human  traveller  who 
laughs  at  the  snow  on  his  hat  and  shoulders. 
Smoke  poured  out  of  its  chimneys,  bespeaking 
brisk  fires  for  festive  purposes.  The  oak  tree  be 
side  it  stood  quieted  of  its  moaning  and  tossing. 
Soon  after  sunrise  a  soul  of  passion  on  scarlet 
wings,  rising  out  of  the  snow-bowed  shrubbery, 
flew  up  to  a  topmost  twig  of  the  oak ;  and  sitting 
there  with  its  breast  to  the  gorgeous  sun  scanned 
for  a  little  while  that  landscape  of  ice.  It  was 
beyond  its  intelligence  to  understand  how  nature 
could  create  it  for  Summer  and  then  take  Summer 
away.  Its  wisdom  could  only  have  ended  in 
wonderment  that  a  sun  so  true  could  shine  on  a 
world  so  false. 

Frolicking  servants  fell  to  work,  sweeping 
porches  and  shovelling  paths.  After  breakfast  a 
heavy-set,  middle-aged  man,  his  face  red  with  fire 
side  warmth  and  laughter,  without  hat  or  gloves 
or  overcoat,  rushed  out  of  the  front  door  pursued 
by  a  little  soldier  sternly  booted  and  capped  and 
gloved;  and  the  two  snowballed  each  other, 
going  at  it  furiously.  Watching  them  through  a 


1 86  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

window  a  little  girl,  dancing  a  dreamy  measure  of 
her  own,  ever  turned  inward  and  beckoned  to 
some  one  to  come  and  look  —  beckoned  in  vain. 

All  day  the  little  boy  beat  the  drum  of  Confucius ; 
all  day  the  little  girl  played  with  the  doll  —  hugged 
to  her  breast  the  symbol  of  ancient  sacrifice,  the 
emblem  of  the  world's  new  mercy.  Along  the 
turnpike  sleigh-bells  were  borne  hither  and  thither 
by  rushing  horses;  and  the  shouts  of  young  men 
on  fire  to  their  marrow  went  echoing  across  the 
shining  valleys. 

Christmas  Day!  Christmas  Day!  Christmas 
Day! 

One  thing  about  the  house  stood  in  tragic  aloof 
ness  from  its  surroundings;  just  outside  the  bed 
room  window  grew  a  cedar,  low,  thick,  covered 
with  snow  except  where  a  bough  had  been  broken 
off  for  decorating  the  house;  here  owing  to  the 
steepness  the  snow  slid  off.  The  spot  looked  like 
a  wound  in  the  side  of  the  Divine  purity,  and  across 
this  open  wound  the  tree  had  hung  its  rosary- 
beads  never  to  be  told  by  Sorrow's  fingers. 

The  sunset  golden  and  gathering  up  its  last  gold 
threw  it  backward  across  the  sadness  of  the  Shield. 


The    White  Daivn  187 

One  by  one  the  stars  came  back  to  their  faithful 
places  above  the  silence  and  the  whiteness.  A 
swinging  lamp  was  lighted  on  the  front  porch  and 
its  rays  fell  on  little  round  mats  of  snow  stamped 
off  by  entering  boot  heels.  On  each  gatepost 
a  low  Christmas  star  was  set  to  guide  and  welcome 
good  neighbors;  and  between  those  beacons  soon 
they  came  hurrying,  fathers  and  mothers  and 
children  assembling  for  the  party. 

Late  into  the  night  the  party  lasted. 

The  logs  blazed  in  deep  fireplaces  and  their 
Forest  Memories  went  to  ashes.  Bodily  comfort 
there  was  and  good-will  and  good  wishes  and  the 
robust  sensible  making  the  best  of  what  is  best  on 
the  surface  of  our  life.  And  hale  eating  and 
drinking  as  old  England  itself  once  ate  and  drank 
at  Yuletide.  And  fast  music  and  dancing  that 
ever  wanted  to  go  faster  than  the  music. 

The  chief  feature  of  the  revelry  was  the  distri 
bution  of  gifts  on  the  Christmas  Tree  —  the  hand 
ing  over  to  this  person  and  to  that  person  of  those 
unread  lessons  of  the  ages  —  little  mummied 
packages  of  the  lord  of  time.  One  thing  no  one 
noted.  Fresh  candles  had  replaced  those  burnt 


1 88  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

out  on  the  Tree  the  night  before :  all  the  candles 
were  white  now. 

Revellers  !  Revellers !  A  crowded  canvas !  A 
brilliantly  painted  scene !  Controlling  every 
thing,  controlling  herself,  the  lady  -of  the  house : 
hunting  out  her  guests  with  some  grace  that 
befitted  each;  laughing  and  talking  with  the 
doctor;  secretly  giving  most  attention  to  the 
doctor's  wife  —  faded  little  sufferer;  with  strength 
in  her  to  be  the  American  wife  and  mother  in  the 
home  of  the  poet's  dream :  the  spiritual  majesty  of 
her  bridal  veil  still  about  her  amid  life's  snow  as  it 
never  lifts  itself  from  the  face  of  the  Jungfrau 
amid  the  sad  most  lovely  mountains :  the  American 
wife  and  mother !  —  herself  the  Jungfrau  among 
the  world's  women ! 

The  last  thing  before  the  company  broke  up  took 
place  what  often  takes  place  there  in  happy  gath 
erings  :  the  singing  of  the  song  of  the  State  which 
is  also  a  song  of  the  Nation  —  its  melody  of  the 
unfallen  home:  with  sadness  enough  in  it,  God 
knows,  but  with  sanctity :  she  seated  at  the  piano 
—  the  others  upholding  her  like  a  living  bulwark. 


The    White  Dawn  189 

There  was  another  company  thronging  the 
rooms  that  no  one  wot  of:  those  Bodiless  Ones 
that  often  are  much  more  real  than  the  em 
bodied  —  the  Guests  of  the  Imagination. 

The  Memories  were  there,  strolling  back  and 
forth  through  the  chambers  arm  and  arm  with  the 
Years :  bestowing  no  cognizance  upon  that  present 
scene  nor  aware  that  they  were  not  alone.  About 
the  Christmas  Tree  the  Wraiths  of  earlier  children 
returned  to  gambol;  and  these  knew  naught  of 
those  later  ones  who  had  strangely  come  out  of 
the  unknown  to  fill  their  places.  Around  the 
walls  stood  other  majestical  Veiled  Shapes  that 
bent  undivided  attention  upon  the  actual  pageant : 
these  were  Life's  Pities.  Ever  and  anon  they 
would  lift  their  noble  veils  and  look  out  upon  that 
brief  flicker  of  our  mortal  joy,  and  drop  them  and 
relapse  into  their  compassionate  vigil. 

But  of  the  Bodiless  Ones  there  gathered  a  soli 
tary  young  Shape  filled  the  entire  house  with  her 
presence.  As  the  Memories  walked  through  the 
rooms  with  the  Years,  they  paused  ever  before  her 
and  mutely  beckoned  her  to  a  place  in  their 
Sisterhood.  The  children  who  had  wandered 


190  The  Bride  of  the  Mistletoe 

back  peeped  shyly  at  her  but  then  with  some  sure 
instinct  of  recognition  ran  to  her  and  threw  down 
their  gifts,  to  put  their  arms  around  her.  And  the 
Pities  before  they  left  the  house  that  night  walked 
past  her  one  by  one  and  each  lifted  its  veil  and 
dropped  it  more  softly. 

This  was  the  Shape: 

In  the  great  bedroom  on  a  spot  of  the  carpet 
under  the  chandelier  —  which  had  no  decoration 
whatsoever  —  stood  an  exquisite  Spirit  of  Youth, 
more  insubstantial  than  Spring  morning  mist,  yet 
most  alive;  her  lips  scarce  parted  —  her  skin  like 
white  hawthorn  shadowed  by  pink — in  her  eyes  the 
modesty  of  withdrawal  from  Love  —  in  her  heart 
the  surrender  to  it.  During  those  distracting 
hours  never  did  she  move  nor  did  her  look  once 
change :  she  waiting  there — waiting  for  some  one 
to  come  —  waiting. 

Waiting. 

THE   END 


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The  Garden  of  a  Commuter's  Wife     illustrated 

"  Reading  it  is  like  having  the  entry  into  a  home  of  the  class 
that  is  the  proudest  product  of  our  land,  a  home  where  love  of 
books  and  love  of  nature  go  hand  in  hand  with  hearty  simple 
love  of  'folks.'  ...  It  is  a  charming  book." —  7^he  Interior. 

People  of  the  Whirlpool  illustrated 

"The  whole  book  is  delicious,  with  its  wise  and  kindly  humor, 
its  just  perspective  of  the  true  values  of  things,  its  clever  pen 
pictures  of  people  and  customs,  and  its  healthy  optimism  for  the 
great  world  in  general."  —  Philadelphia  Evening  Telegraph. 

The  Woman  Errant 

"The  book  is  worth  reading.  It  will  cause  discussion.  It  is 
an  interesting,  fictional  presentation  of  an  important  modern 
question,  treated  with  fascinating  feminine  adroitness."  —  Miss 
GILDER  in  The  Chicago  Tribune. 

At  the  Sign  of  the  Fox 

"  Her  little  pictures  of  country  life  are  fragrant  with  a  genuine 
love  of  nature,  and  there  is  fun  as  genuine  in  her  notes  on 
rural  character." — New  York  Tribune. 

The  Garden,  You  and  I 

"The  delightful  humor  which  pervaded  the  earlier  books,  and 
without  which  Barbara  would  not  be  Barbara,  has  lost  nothing 
of  its  poignancy."  —  Congregationalist. 

The  Open  Window 

"  A  little  vacation  from  the  dust  of  the  city  and  the  sophistica 
tion  of  the  commonplace."  —  Argonaut. 

Poppea  of  the  Post  Office 


THE    MACMILLAN    COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS,   64-66  FIFTH  AVENUE,   NEW  YOEK 


THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 
STAMPED  BELOW 


AN     INITIAL    FINE     OF     25     CENTS 

WILL  BE  ASSESSED  FOR  FAILURE  TO  RETURN 
THIS  BOOK  ON  THE  DATE  DUE.  THE  PENALTY 
WILL  INCREASE  TO  5O  CENTS  ON  THE  FOURTH 
DAY  AND  TO  S1.OO  ON  THE  SEVENTH  DAY 
OVERDUE. 


DEC  24  1932 
OES  27  1932 


LD  21-50w-8,'32 


ID 


367702 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


